Goal
Currently, Fedora has hundreds of mailing lists, with about 90 with some degree of activity, and a handful that are very active. I want to consolidate that all in one place, which includes bringing our contributor community along successfully. If there is a better option than Discourse for this, no one has created it yet.
Short version
I’ve been actively working on this for three years and thinking about it for at least ten. In talking to people in my community about what blocks them, this specific thing has come up repeatedly.
Long version:
Around the same time Discourse started, we created a Mailman3 GUI front end called Hyperkitty, meant to be a modern web UI that people could use to access the underlying mailing lists. You can see this in action for the Fedora Devel List.
Hyperkitty has some neat ideas, but wasn’t really funded at the scale necessary to succeed, and ended up launching with the initial design and no provision for improving and fixing it in real use. And, it takes email as the underlying baseline, and that really tied things down — even if we’d had the resources, keeping to that as the greatest-common factor would have made a frustrating limit.
So I understand where you’re at with this. If you take Wayback Machine journey over discourse.org’s history you can see that Discourse leaned pretty hard into taking lessons learned from both forums and mailing lists and replacing both…

… and that’s mostly survived through today, although there’s less other talk about mailing lists in the various pages. You’ve gone through the same thing that we would have had we resources to invest in Hyperkitty — the email as too-low-highest-baseline problem — and come to the logical conclusion. I totally understand where you’re coming from in now explicitly saying that getting people to the website is the proper use.
Currently:
- We have dozens of active mailing lists
- with hundreds of active participants
- and many thousands of passive subscribers.
- These lists go back literally over 20 years.
- Many old-school open source people are really attached to this way of working.
- it’s familiar,
- already set up, and
- arrives into a daily routine without any need to add “check some website”
- many people are active across different parts of the project, but that “footprint” is very individual
But:
I. These lists are less functional than many people think they are:
- moderation is next to impossible (all-or-nothing big stick at best)
- despite efforts, people don’t always keep to the standards we expect
- mega-threads are not good discussion
- off-list harassment is easy to launch and out of our control
- cross-posting is a mess, as subscriptions aren’t consistent
- impossible to keep up with unless you’re committed
- people who should participate don’t for various mixes of the above reasons
II. Email is not the future
- Mailing lists largely opaque to search engines and do not look like “real activity” to most of the world
- New people do not want to sign up for mailing lists.
- Mailing list “culture” is not really a thing anymore.
- And Gmail’s web interface is actively hostile to traditional conventions like inline replies.
III. Email at large is doomed
- Big providers have the scale to “solve” spam for themselves, and now have anti-incentive to solve it globally.
- Small providers have decreasing chance of delivering reliably.
- Mailing lists inherently re-publish, and all of the signing and verification infrastructure doesn’t really care.
- Companies are switching to Slack and the like for functional communication, leaving email for announcements and broadcasts.
- and Jira and github and so on for workflow-focused interactions.
- Again, “normal” people aren’t using it for anything but getting notices about various from companies they are customers of. It’s not really for personal communication anymore.
But there’s still a need
We have real-time conversation covered, but we still need the long form, asynchronous conversations that mailing lists have provided. Chat doesn’t cover everything, doesn’t work well globally and with volunteers with varying time commitments. And workflow tools are too narrow.
Discourse really is the best option
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Mailing lists aren’t a viable future.
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Hyperkitty is stuck in 2014.
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We have too much to just use Github / Gitlab.
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Other possibilities don’t cut it:
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Ponymail suffers from the same email-as-GCF problem
- Vanilla is not great. I’ll just leave that there.
- Google Groups is the worst of everything.
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On the + side for Discourse: many other open source communities are consolidating around it. Notably: Python, GNOME…
Enter Cassandra
Not the database — I mean, telling people of doom but no one believing. I hear a lot of “Email works fine”, and “I don’t see a problem with mailing lists”, and, of course, “I hate forums”, or even specifically “I don’t like Discourse”.
But, we really do need change.
So…
I need to get a large, active, important open source community to move their primary project communications platform to Discourse, and a lot of people are skeptical. It’s a big change. I want to make that as easy as possible, both to make it easier and nicer for the people who are skeptical but willing to try and to make it possible to try for people who have email interaction — including filtering — as a personal blocker.
I think that once they’re there, many people will adjust their behaviors — we’ll get more people discovering that directly interacting with the site isn’t so bad. And we have our own project-wide notification system I’ve got plans to tie in, and hopefully that can eventually give people more of what they really need.
But in the meantime, I need to give people what they’re asking for.