Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

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So, having been around a lot of different communication methods, I think email lists aren’t ideal, but for serious projects they’re better than all the alternatives.

Chat has a way of getting completely lost. All your knowledge that goes into chat either goes into somebody’s head or it just disappears into the ether. This includes Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Useful as a secondary channel but serious projects need something more permanent.

Bug tracking systems just don’t support the kind of conversations you want to have about things. They’re focused on bugs and features. Searchability is excellent, but there are a lot of conversations which just end up not happening at all. Things like questions.

That brings us back to mailing lists. IMO… the way you fix it is by having redundancies on both sides of the list. People sending messages to the mailing list should send followup messages. You should also have multiple people reading the list, so if one person misses a message, maybe another gets it.

Mailing lists are not perfect, just better than the alternatives, for serious projects.

(I also think forums are good.)

This is why the D community has forums. The messages are all archived as static web pages and are a gold mine of information.

https://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/

BTW, like HackerNews, the D forums don't allow emojis, icons, javascript, multiple fonts, and all that nonsense. Just text. What a relief!

So it just like email list which have an archive - except you can't use email clients but instead can use web-based interface?

You can use the web interface if you post:

https://forum.dlang.org/

The static pages are there for browsing. They load fast, and I like the entire thread being on one page. No clickety-clicking and forgetting where you are in a forest of postings.

^_^ sucks when you actually need to talk about emoji though :/

Stating the Unicode code points as U+1F4A9 or (D syntax) \U0001F4A9 is a reasonable workaround.

We discourage posts that aren't relevant in some way to D programming.

One of the reasons I enjoy HackerNews is dang's enlightened and sensible moderation policy.

I think OP meant cases like, "I need to process a string with this emoji in D" etc

Would you ever need to talk about a specific emoji?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

a forum is just a webinterface for a mailinglist.

they are both messages in threads. what's different is the presentation.

some of the forums i use support both seamlessly, and i can choose which interface i prefer.

of course for the issue we are discussing, presentation is what matters. but, for most forums i do not believe they would have made it any easier to not miss a message. just look at hackernews. it is actually quite difficult to track which messages i have not read yet, (even if there is a marker on what's new) and it is therefore very easy to miss some.

that is not the case with email. because my mail client tracks the rad/unread status for each message. the problem with RMS has nothing to do with the form of a mailing list but with his particular async style of accessing the internet.

Piling on about chat. Slack threads are an abomination. They aren’t inline with the main channel so you can’t cut and paste an entire conversation with threads. And does exporting a channel include threads? Who knows because the admin wouldn’t do it for me.

praise https://github.com/rusq/slackdump

it does include threads, and no need for admins

You’ve saved my life!

Threads are amazing as an idea and what you're missing is just an implementation detail in Slack. More platforms should have threads (WhatsApp, etc).

They're really bolted on in Slack though. I've been using Slack since 2019 and they were bolted on and annoying then, and they still are.

Their biggest problem is that nobody uses them, though.

Threads were introduced in, what, late 2016? The start of 2017? Some time around then, anyway. They were even more badly integrated at the start; there was no way to be notified about new messages in a thread, for example. By 2019 things were a little better, but - as you noticed - still not great.

And since then... nothing. No more improvements. Development seems to have more or less halted since the Salesforce acquisition.

I used irc for a couple of decades before Slack, so was happy with purely linear chat (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git). Threads make everything more horrible, but at this point it feels like I just have to put up with it.

> (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git).

I like both rebasing and threads. More generally, I hate hate hate the 20+ individual messages on a single topic in a channel. It's just so annoying, threads are great for stuff like that, and give you one target for a reminder/update on whatever the issue is.

And yet, every time I change companies I realise again how much most people just don't threads on Slack.

it's not the existence of threads that are the problem but their presentation. instead of hidden threads i'd prefer to be able to quote an message and have it shown inline. the fact that threads are so hidden is a major reason to avoid using them (for me at least)

alternatives:

discord has inline quoting and threads. treads are a bit more visible.

zulip creates a new thread for every message because it prompts you to set a topic, and then you browse the messages by topic.

Nobody uses them? You need better companies :-)) I've worked at a startup using Slack and a huge company using Slack plus I've seen a bunch of other companies. They were all using threads everywhere, they're incredibly useful, especially for big or active channels.

> Nobody uses them? You need better companies :-))

To be fair, this is hyperbolic. To clarify, small groups within most orgs tend not to use threads in their internal channels AND congratulate everyone on their birthdays. The combination of this irritates me due to repeated notification spam.

You can educate them on this. It's not easy and tact is needed, but it's doable.

Discourse (or other forums) would be my pick and what I’ve driven other projects I’m involved with to success.

They can be treated like mailing lists, but are easy to navigate , easy to search and index, and easy to categorize.

What are the current practical non-self-hosted options for an open source project mailing list? We (portaudio) are being (gently) pushed off our .edu-maintained mailing list server, google groups is the only viable option that I know about, and I know not everyone will be happy about that choice.

Sourcehut, maybe?

https://lists.sr.ht/

https://sourcehut.org/

Freelists[1] is still around, LuaJIT hosts its mailing list there. So is Savannah[2]. Would also be interesting to know if it’s actually realistic to ask Sourceware[3] to give you a list or if those pages only reflect the state of affairs from two decades ago. (Only the last of these uses public-inbox, which I personally much prefer to Mailman.)

[1] https://www.freelists.org/

[2] https://savannah.nongnu.org/, https://lists.nongnu.org/

[3] https://sourceware.org/mission.html#services

We use Mattermost and it’s working pretty well. The search is decent and it captures a lot more of the daily chitchat that isn’t long/serious enough for email and would otherwise be lost. The real benefit comes when you need to find some snippet that know was discussed 18 months ago and too much water’s passed under the bridge to remember exactly what was said.

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