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Comment by tempest_ | Hacker News Reader

In the spirit of the open source movement, the PostgreSQL community has always tried to operate transparently and fairly, and provide resources for people to adopt, use, and promote PostgreSQL. We continuously look to improve and are very much open to feedback (look no further than the discussions on our mailing lists)!

Perhaps I am just a little too young but I do find the use of mailing lists in some of the older open source projects to be a bit cumbersome in 2021. I know there are advantages to them and their semi decentralized nature is a feature but I sure do find them difficult to interact with.

Regardless of the above I do hope they come to a amicable solution and it is interesting to me to find that Postgres trade marks are held by a Canadian entity.

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Linux has had the LKML for almost three decades. It still works well for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_mailing_list

Does it? I find it really cumbersome. We were just interacting with it the other day and found it annoyingly baroque. There's a lot of assumed knowledge and I've read a fair bit of documentation and have been following Kernel development since before my career.

It "works" for the people who it works for and that's it.

Ok, what would you suggest in it's place?

I don't have to suggest anything in its place. I'm just relaying that I've actually interacted with it for years and have found it cumbersome, and I don't think it's fair to say that it's "worked" as if it hasn't made first-contributions significantly harder for a lot of people.

At this point I might suggest Gitlab, but I don't really feel like having a back and forth about what may or may not be ideal about that.

I don't participate in any mailing lists since at least 2008 and I'm pretty sophisticated. What constitutes "works" is that they (Linux Kernel working group) have a very primitive forum (mailing list) wherein there is no recognized pressure to change. People still use HAM radio because they "work" but that's not the optimal way to collaborate.

Give it a few more decades.

I've used the LKML to contribute changes, and I'm also an amateur radio operator. I guess that makes me a fossil.

It's a shame the PostgreSQL lists dropped off Gmane. That used to be a decent way to read them.

Cumbersone in what way?

Worse UX to this generation of developers than say Discord or other IMs I guess.

I don't think discord or slack is a great alternative as it is very ephemeral (and not really open source / decentralized) but I do think interacting with a mailing list is worse than a threaded forum type layout.

Email has had threading since before I was born.

Email has never had explicit threading - email has a bunch of usage habits that many clients interpret as attempted threading (which often results in threads of steam receipts in my gmail webview FYI).

There are a number of clients that are particularly good at respecting the specific approaches to threading used by mailing lists and that come with a plethora of powerful keyboard interactions to make browsing a whole bunch of emails trivial. But newer devs may be quite unfamiliar with those options and I don't think it's particularly easy information to learn... especially if your webmail has "just worked" for most other uses.

You've been downvoted but I believe your post is accurate. At least with regards to IMAP and any RFCs I've read myself, though I'm open to hearing from others. Much of email is absolutely implemented in client-side 'de-facto' ways.

edit: I see now in the RFC that there is a description.

> Email has never had explicit threading

The "In-Reply-To" header is described in rfc2822. It is an explicit header in the RFC that is how you create threads.

Every mail client I've used correctly understands how to thread reply-chains using In-Reply-To.

The thing you're talking about, steam receipts grouping, is not a feature of email, but a specific feature of gmail's web view which is not mandated by any RFC and indeed is not explicit threading...

But there is a real way to thread which is defined in the RFC, and if you use a reasonable email client (aka not gmail), every mailing list's threading will work for you.

Discord is amazing, especially with the advanced search features, and now threads. An open source alternative to discord like the one featured on ShowHN recently would be ideal.

The only blocking issue is that their success (and subsequent spam/abuse issues) is greater than their focus on open access, to the extent that they formally disallow 3rd party client access.

So at the one end of the spectrum with have IMAP/SMTP, in the middle we have things like Telegram (everything's GPL3! The protocol is terrible and here are all the details! Go nuts!)... and at the other end we have Discord: One Protocol, One Allowed Client™®©.

Do I use Discord? No.

Would I like to use Discord? Yes.

Why can't I use Discord? The client is too much for my older laptop.

Would I like to use Discord? Yes there are a pile of people on there I'm missing out

Can I do anything about it? Yes, I have two options:

1) use https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ until it suffers the same fate as https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless

2) throw the whole thing to the wind until I have better hardware

Hmm. You know come to think about it the chances are people with similar interests to myself are probably also stuck on older hardware too and probably won't be using Discord either...

With the amount of people who don't care about the difference between 10ns and 10ms calling themselves developers, I'm sure even Clippy would be the perfect IDE for some of them, so that's not saying much. Apart from the lack of nesting, Discord and other instant messengers are way worse at creating a searchable archive, the best option AFAIK is to export the chat with third-party tools that break the TOS.. an option so bad, it's not even an option.

Let me say that I am honestly curious too.

Perhaps I am alone is this (based on the votes) but when I go to https://www.postgresql.org/list/ it requires a great deal of clicking to drill down and lets say I eventually end up some where like https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-general/2021-09/ I am greeted with a lot "Re:" "No subject" etc.

Perhaps what is comes down to is I am trying to interact with a mailing list using a browser which is perhaps unfair. I would say that discovering what is being talked about and the barriers to entry for subscribing/unsubscribing provide way more friction then, lets say a subreddit or even a more classical forum layout.

So the downvotes on your perfectly legitimate comment are absurd, but here we are.

To get technical, the problem that you're having isn't that interacting with mailing lists is cumbersome, but rather, interacting with mailing list archives is cumbersome. You're not wrong. Web interfaces for mailing list archives haven't really changed in yonks, and there's little incentive to do so. The only people who use the archives are the people who explicitly do not interact with the list itself.

The people who actually use mailing lists, are members of the list itself, and receive the messages in their mailbox. From that point onwards, their interaction with the mailing list is only as cumbersome as their Mail User Agent (email client, MUA). Using a decent MUA that supports threading is step one to having an enjoyable experience with a mailing list.

Unfortunately, in 2021, we've regressed from a world where we have depth of options where it comes to MUAs, to where we are now where the vast majority use webmail solutions exclusively. Webmail has definitely improved since the 90s and 00s, but unfortunately not every feature has come along for the ride, making that also tricky.

As far as the barriers to entry go, thats subjective. Subscribing to a subreddit requires creating a reddit account. Subscribing to most forums requires signing up with an email address, password, possibly username as well, along with other biographical details (optional in some cases), and validating your email is real. Subscribing to a mailing list requires signing up with an email address and validating your email is real.

Anything you're not used to using, is always going to feel more cumbersome. If "happy mailman day" doesn't mean anything to you, you probably haven't had much experience with mailing lists (or have, but much more recent).

That feels like a totally fair assessment.

I guess I would say that mailing lists favor producers over consumers.

Often when I am looking at a mailing list it is for the same reason I am poking through a GitHub issue. I am looking for someone who had a similar problem and maybe someone else had a solution.

Thus I think I am largely a consumer.

As a consumer I dont often think, let me go to my email client. My email client is where I get bills and notifications and some personal correspondence. It is definitely not where I go when I am looking to consume.

I would disagree that it is as easy as just signing up with an email. I have to set up filters etc and shift to an entirely different client after I sign up the entering an email address is just the first step.

I feel that for people who are core developers email lists are probably great. They are essentially looking to communicate with only a few people and the topics are quite specific. Where they fail me is they make it harder to convert a consumer to a producer. For all the problems I have with OSS's seemingly centralization on Github I am far more likely to drop into some random Github issue than I am to join a mailing list.

How about an interface like GitHub issues? Do you feel that strikes a balance between consumers/producers for this kind of discussions?

Edit: I think you updated your comment while I replied (or maybe I just hit reply without seing the last part of your comment). I see now that you've mentioned GitHub issues, which is a kind of interface that I've seen get a better balance, but I'm not sure how it stands from a producor pov against a mailing list (decentralization is obviously lacking on them).

GH issues does not fan out into contextual threads. That makes it a nonstarter.

They have "Discussions" now which includes threads and such, but I haven't really used it much other than leaving a comment just yesterday, so I don't really know how good or bad it is.

> I guess I would say that mailing lists favor producers over consumers.

It favors insiders and temporal information, but there's no bias on the producers vs. consumers dimension. Unfortunately, you are an outsider trying to access old information, so you are severely disfavored here. A subredit is slightly less biased against outsiders but is much more heavily biased against old information.

If you can structure your information it is almost always better in another format, but there is always something that can't.

Is there a good primer on how exactly to even use a mailing list in an efficient way? I always thought the entry point was through the archives, but I guess that's not correct?

I think you're missing the major aspect of mailing lists that is why they are used for projects like Postgres or Linux: transparency. (at least when the lists are also archived, which is a different issue).

Mailing lists lets the future user see the decision making process unfold throughout a thread. These interactions can be archived and searched. Most users don't interact with these mailing lists in realtime through an MUA. They search an archive to find the appropriate thread. And critically -- anyone on the list can build the archive. It doesn't require any special infrastructure on behalf of the list owners.

It can be cumbersome, but it's also robust. Imagine if the history was only present in bugzilla, Jira, GitHub issues, or a forum? Bug trackers aren't always the best way to work through a brand-new API design. Email back and forth with collaborators on the other hand...

Also -- mailing list archives are also ridiculously easy to index in a search engine. Data stored in bug trackers aren't always as simple...

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