Conversation

Jonathan Corbet

Sigh ... another important mailing list (fedora-devel) is about to go dark: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230420212037.GA7197@mattdm.org/

I get it that email sucks, but forum systems do as well. The future we are headed toward seems to have every project in its own little walled garden, isolated from the others.

But at least we can get cute little badges ...
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@bookwar Discourse instances do have RSS feeds, but they are nearly useless. You can see if a topic starts, but nothing thereafter. I do try to follow some Discourses (including the Fedora one) that way, but it's painful.

Now a proper NNTP feed...*that* would be a useful thing...
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@joeyh Indeed, I posted it to a *distributed* forum where we each can choose the tools we use to deal with it. I also don't mistake this forum for a place to have serious development discussions.

I did also send an email to the list expressing my thoughts as part of the discussion thread.
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@mattdm So how does one have a discussion involving, say, both the Fedora and Python communities? Cross-posting to mailing lists is easy, and happens frequently in some communities. Mailing lists are part of a global space. Each Discourse instance, as far as I know, is its own little world.
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@funnelfiasco Cross-posting is important, but that's not the whole of it. I follow a huge world in my NNTP reader; LWN would not be possible without it. Following a Discourse instance requires actually going and looking there; it's not scalable in any way. Each instance is its own little world, and the travel costs between them are high.
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@mattdm The kernel community does cross-posting routinely, including often cross-posting with non-kernel lists. It's not generally seen as terrible; instead, it's a way to pull together the right people for any specific discussion. The world you describe is fine for *Fedora* discussions, but absolutely excludes anybody outside of that garden.
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@bookwar @mattdm Are you thinking of this talk by Greg KH, perhaps? https://lwn.net/Articles/702177/
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@mattdm @broonie I'm honestly not really sure how vger does its spam filtering, but it's pretty effective. Blocking email with HTML attachments probably helps quite a bit - a solution that may be less appealing on other lists. There are no paid moderators at all.
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@mattdm @hrw The few lists I'm on directly go to folders. The bulk of my email following, though, is done in gnus, which allows me to quickly deal with something over 100 different lists. If those lists were on forum sites spread across the net, getting through it all would be much more of a slog; I doubt I would actually do it.
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@corbet @mattdm @broonie disallowing HTML mail gets rid of 99% of spam. The rest is linkspam, mostly.
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@brauner @corbet @mattdm @hrw yes, my goal for this year is to offer read-only inboxes that are lei-prefilteted for each subsystem using curated search queries. Maintainers can then source them into their inbox via POP3 or IMAP, or read them via nntp.
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