[asterisk-dev] Mailing List Future

[Andreas Wehrmann]

Am 04.12.2023 um 13:52 schrieb asterisk at phreaknet.org:
> I strongly object to not having an asterisk-dev list. Mailing lists 
> are essential for FOSS developer discussion. The majority of 
> non-ephemeral development discussion happens either on IRC or here on 
> the asterisk-dev list - just check the archives to see that it's still 
> active. Most of us are not on the community forums and/or couldn't be 
> bothered to use them. You can go and see now that "Development" on the 
> community forums is basically dead, because nobody wants to use it, so 
> trying to push that on everyone is a terrible idea.
>
> Even for users, I think the loss of asterisk-users will be a major 
> loss. Far more *discussion* is happening on the Discourse forum, but 
> far more *quality* discussion still happens on asterisk-users. Being 
> on a mailing list seems to be a natural weedout for junk questions. 
> More serious questions still seem to come through on the mailing list. 
> The community forums is far fuller of useless postings from people who 
> can't tell a hard drive from a memory stick. Nobody wants to wade 
> through a bunch of low-quality posts to find the few that might have 
> some use. Thus, getting rid of asterisk-users would see a significant 
> drop in the average quality of user engagement. But at least, even if 
> the -users list is dropped, the -dev list should stick around in some 
> form.
>
> I know the forums can have emails enabled that you can receive, and 
> no, that's not a proper replacement for a mailing list.
>
> GitHub Discussions aren't a proper mailing list, either, so ultimately 
> I think that will run into the same issue. GitHub has a lot of bells 
> and whistles but most of them aren't as built out as using the proper 
> tool they try to emulate.
>
> I think #3 is the right choice. It's using the right tool for the 
> right job. If you don't want to maintain the lists, have somebody else 
> do it. I do a combination of hosted and self-hosted for my own lists. 
> Contrary to the opinions of some, people, especially technical people, 
> have not "moved on" from mailing lists; they are widely used, and I 
> get hundreds of emails a day from them that I have a good workflow for.
>
> Most lists I'm on that used to be elsewhere (e.g. Yahoo Groups, Google 
> Groups, mailman, LISTSERV, other custom or independent platforms) have 
> now migrated to groups.io and are generally highly satisfied with it 
> compared to other platforms. It used to be completely free; it's now 
> free for lists under 100 members, or ones that are grandfathered in. 
> As the maintainer of several lists there and a member of many more, 
> I've been pretty happy with it.
>
> I'd suggest creating a list there and letting people on this list 
> manually opt into it, since there are probably a lot of people on 
> mailman that aren't active anymore. If it's under 100 members, it's 
> completely free anyways. If more than 100 people join, that means 
> people here *really* like mailing lists and find value in them, and 
> I'm sure Sangoma can afford $20 a month for it, if it really doesn't 
> want to run mailman lists anymore that badly, and $20 is a small price 
> to keep developers happy.
>
> NA

I'm signing this as well.
I work with several FOSS projects and basically all have something in 
common: A mailing list.
Now, if different projects get the idea of migrating to different 
forums, things become really impractical.
Right now; I can open my e-mail client and immediately search 
for/through discussions, no need to fire up the browser and log into 
some forum.
And this works cross project (for the most part).

If I want to take part in a discussion, I just select the mail and press 
"reply list"; easy as that.
Internet searches, ML archives: saved me a couple of times, sometimes, 
the messages that helped were older than a decade.

I think keeping a pretty "low tech" way for this (like mailing lists) is 
important, especially for a project as big and important as Asterisk
because it makes it more accessible and more likely "to be around" in 
the future; there is less potential for "breakage".


Best Regards,
Andreas