[Disclaimer: I’m not a “core” Rust developer, just a “normal” Rust developer, working on a Scheme interpreter. Please don’t take this reply the wrong way; it’s just my opinion, which I’m not imposing on anyone, I’m only expressing it.]

After ~100 replies, and almost 10 days, I am astonished that searching for the word “mail” appears only four times, and when it does is about the integration between GitHub / Discourse and emails.

So why do I care about mail: over the years I was interested in many open-source projects, and from their community discussions I learnt quite a lot; and for most (i.e. almost 99%) of these projects all this “peering into the community discussions” happened by subscribing to their mailing lists, creating some labels in GMail, and using the “mute” and “star” features. This way I was able to handle more that 150 projects at one time (with an daily intake of about 100 new threads per day, and more than 1k emails per day.)

Now it seems that “lately” some projects moved to “fancier” community discussion channels:

the majority to Discourse-based deployments;

some other to various PHPforum clones;

a few other use GitHub issues;

So what is wrong with these “fancier” discussion channels:

they lack “proper” integration with email (take 1); yes, they can send you emails, but good luck trying to create any useful filters (especially in GMail), mainly because they lack a core fundamental functionality of email community discussions – correctly setting the List-Id header;

they lack “proper” integration with email (take 2): yes, they can send you emails, yes they’ll clog your inbox, and no they don’t look like “proper” emails… they look more like HTML-based advertisments from your local grocery store;

following more than one project makes you have to “hunt” discussions in multiple places – i.e. one tab per “community”;

following more than one project will make you feel disoriented due to the various “layouts”, “color schemes”, and other “eye-candy”; take for example internals.rust-lang.org and users.rust-lang.org – although they belong to the same project, run the same software, and possibly are administered by the same people, they have slightly different “layouts” and “color schemes” – on the main one uses “red” for selected tabs while the other uses “blue”;

they are “ephemerous” – when the VM goes down, so does all the “community history”… (“that ain’t right” would say the sys-admin because he has “backups”…)

they don’t work offline; (neither does GMail, but one always has the option of offline IMAP backups, Thunderbird, etc.)

etc.

So in conclusion one would ask what’s the point of my post: raising awareness of the fact that “newer” and “fancier” isn’t especially “better” for everyone or in all circumstances.

(There is a reason why even in 2018 the IETF still issues RFC documents as plain-text, with 80 columns wide…)

I do see the advantages of alternative discussion channels – and Discourse seems to be the least “unpleasing” one – however I would have loved a little bit more attention to the “grumpy-stuck-in-the-past” generation that prefers mail-oriented workflow…