It's unfortunate there aren't many good hosted mailing list services out there. Google Groups makes it hard to use without a google id, and mailman is tricky to setup/maintain.
In fact, I wish anyone would do that. I've had detailed plans of what a service like that would look like for over two years, and no time to take a stab at it myself. If someone here is actually interested, feel free to contact me.
Everyone wants to jump in on the blog-engine space and invent their own blog engine (I'm guilty of this myself).
We need more people to jump in on the mailing-list/forum type products.
But like a lot of successful people will tell you, if you want to be successful too, solve the dirty problems.
Voting isn't generally a feature you want for discussions - voting provides visibility over a short period of time, and then the topic dies off, which is a very big issue with reddit-likes being used for discussion. Newcomers to a highly popular topic are on equal footing with the rest of the participants, while on Reddit/HN the topic is overwhelmed and only the highly popular, old comments get visibility.
This is very suitable if you don't want everyone to have equal footing. For example, discussions centered around video games, politics, social issues, etc. For open source it tends to be bad. This is an off-topic meta-discussion I'd love to take further, in private, if only it'd take me a click to do so. :)
If I remember correctly, that's actually one of the continuously rotating suggestions on below the button on their home page.
Then there is the spam. Once targeted the spam can get really bad. Meteor JS suffered this and moved to the open source forum software http://www.discourse.org.
One option is to migrate away from mailing lists and towards something like a forum; but forums, while they provide very low barrier-to-entry, produce a fundamentally terrible user experience. (Yes, including HN. This text box I'm typing into is an embarrassment.)
What I'd really like, I suppose, is a service which provides an easy-to-use web forum with an SMTP gateway for those people who hate forums. And then have it all hosted via my project website so that I don't have to redirect people to some dubious third pary site. Bet I'm not going to find one, though...
> I have read and agree to the above terms , and agree that if I ask FreeLists for email addresses or send SPAM using their resources, they have permission to inflict severe pain on me with large, blunt objects.
[emphasis mine]
[1] http://gna.org/
It was originally built for sizable coworking communities but is pretty decent. Mail integrated, daily digests, etc.
Still a WIP but pretty mature at this point.
Those prices are really high too for what it presents itself doing. And I don't care about all the people talking about how awesome it is, really I don't. Show me the sausage.
If this project wants to go anywhere it's going to have to severely review its strategy.
150 members before you're in the "if you have to ask you can't afford it" bracket -- even small, niche projects would have more people than that subscribed to the announce list -- and that's $129/month. You could run a majordomo list with no member limits on a VPS for less than $10/month.