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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason to use mailing lists for a new project? I totally get why you'd want to keep the mailing list structure for existing ones especially if your contributors are used to it, but it's such an off putting experience that I don't get why a newer project would want to use it. I read the article about why mailing lists are still good from sourcehut, but I think it just isn't convincing. So I'm genuinely wondering what I'm missing? I'm glad sourcehut is taking a different approach to other git services but I can't help but think that there's got to be a better way even if you don't want "GitHub style" pull requests.

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Mailing list is an open standard that anyone can join. Git even sends patches to it via git CLI.

People talk about federation and decentralisation a lot, e-mail is sort of that.

But it sucks UX-wise compared to github. Linux can afford it, because it will always have enough contributors anyway.

A mailing list is not the greatest thing in my opinion:

1. You have to subscribe to it 2. The interface for finding old issues can be bad (like long densely-packed threads with no search feature) 3. It forces me to manage my inbox (well, that's my problem)

They can all be solvable though. I never used sourcehut - are these all the same issues?

> threads with no search feature

If it's a mailing list then surely the mail is searchable using your choice of mail client?

Presuming you were subscribed to the mailing list at the time the issue was reported. Which may be true for your own projects, but is much less likely for arbitrary projects that you may be looking to report an issue on yourself.

Not for emails that were sent before you subscribed.

(and that means new contributors get the worse experience.. not ideal)

Lot of mailing lists offer the option to download mbox with old messages. So you can just download those for months/years when you were not subscribed.

they do? I don't think I've ever seen this in practice. And even if I do, having to download dozens of monthly archives is pretty annoying.

(Also for example SourceForge only gives mbox files to administrators, not to regular users [0])

[0] https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mailing%20List...

I mostly read GNU mailing lists, and there mbox is offered https://lists.gnu.org/archive/mbox/ . Linux seems to offer a git repositories with the messages, which is bit annoying, but script-able.

Well, it is not perfect, much still, the hassle is one-time, so meh.

It's one-time for one project, but is a repeated hassle over multiple projects, and likely a different hassle at that.

Sourcehut's specifically allows download of the full mailing list, or just the last 30 days.

Threads can also be downloaded individually.

And the search function is decent(ish) in the web interface.

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