Hello are you following this thread elsewhere?
The discussion is on hold while @willingc writes up a PEP to propose how we should handle our communication.
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Thanks! We are having similar discussions in the Argentina and Spain communities. Iâll write to @willingc
Related: Mozilla discussion http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/
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Thanks for the link, thatâs a very nice article. I agree with everyone he says.
They have posted an even better follow-up, which I think lays out quite compellingly a great argument for ditching old-school mediums like IRC or mailing lists:
Weâre getting better at this at Mozilla in hundreds of different ways, at recognizing how important it is that the experience of getting from âI want to helpâ to âIâm set up to helpâ to âIâm helpingâ be as simple and painless as possible. [âŚ]
Getting involved in the community, though, is still harder than it needs to be; try watching somebody new to open source development try to join an IRC channel sometime. Watch them go from âwhatâs IRCâ to finding a client to learning how to use the client to joining the right server, then the right channel, only to find that the reward for all that effort is no backscroll, no context, and no idea who youâre talking to or if youâre in the right place or if youâre shouting into the void because the people youâre looking for arenât logged in at the same time. Itâs like asking somebody to learn to operate an airlock on their own so they can toss themselves out of it.
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The article youâre quoting from does not talk about mailing-lists. Itâs entirely about a âsynchronous messaging systemâ, i.e. replacing IRC.
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I understand that, but the spirit of the argument about accessibility and lowering the barrier to entry still applies to mailing lists. Fixating on details like synchronicity is imo splitting hairs.
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Does it? Where are the usability studies that say mailing-lists are not accessible?
No, mailing-lists (and e-mail in general) are not the same as IRC in that regard. IRC is a specialistsâ technology that sees little use nowadays. e-mail is a massively used means of communication. There are probably hundreds of millions of people around the world who use e-mail regularly, most of whom are not technology specialists.
Criticizing mailing-lists on the basis that IRC is not accessible is gratuitous.
For whatever itâs worth, I think for a lot of people email is used more as a means of notification rather than communication. e.g. âX thing happened on Y siteâ. It was interesting to me to learn that at my daughterâs school, most kids the only email they have is their school provided one that they barely use, and their primary means of communication is WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Kik, etc.
I also think that mailing lists != email, because the mailing list software adds on a whole additional layer of complexity and jank that the vast majority of people have never interacted with.
All thatâs to say, that I donât think that the comparison is entirely wrong (though there are obvious differences which means itâs not entirely right either).
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FWIW, I think the contrary 
IOW, without statistical data, anyone has their personal opinion about this.
There are lots of things that kids donât do, because theyâre not interesting to them. An argument based on the usage patterns of kids sounds like a fallacy to me.
For regular users, the complexity is pretty much hidden. Basically, you write or reply to a given e-mail address, and youâre talking to a number of people. Most of the interaction (UI, etc.) is the same as with regular e-mail.
IOW, if you take someone whoâs a bit acquainted with e-mail, talking on a mailing-list probably does not feel like a large step. However, if you try to introduce the same person to a custom communication platform such as Discourse, the amount of learning and familiarizing involved is higher.
Add to that the fact that most people are acquainted with e-mail, while most are not acquainted with Discourse, and IMHO itâs pretty clear that mailing-lists are more approachable to most people.
This doesnât mean, btw, that there are no arguments against mailing-lists. Perhaps they donât scale. Perhaps they promote certain undesirable communication patterns. etc. But I donât think accessibility is a reasonable argument.
To be clear, while she is my kid, they are in fact adults I think itâs important to look at what the ânext generationâ is doing though, lest we fall into a trap where weâre unable to meaningfully attract those people into the community. That doesnât need to mean abandoning mailing lists for sure, but writing off an entire demographic as not mattering because they arenât your demographic does not seem like a good solution for the long term health of Python.
For example, see: Email is dying among mobile's youngest users | TechCrunch
Assuming youâre already on the mailing list. Now pretend youâre a brand new person who wants to jump into an already existing thread. Now youâre navigating an archaic, hard to use web interface and trying to figure out how to turn that into an email in your email client.
IMO, mailing lists are pretty much entirely different from how most people use email and other than the most basic of the UI elements. Is discourse the ârightâ answer? I donât know. Iâve personally found using Discourse way nicer than any of the Python mailing lists. But I think there is a lot of evidence out there that email in general is not being used for communication between people nearly as much as it used to be and thereâs likely going to be an inflection point where expecting users to use email as their primary means of communication is going to stagnate the community.
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Itâs definitely true that email is not the communication tool of choice for many people, and also that email (as most people use it) is not the same as mailing lists. But general principles remain useful. The points about accessibility and barriers to entry from the Mozilla posts are very relevant, even if only indirectly. We definitely should be making it easy for new people to join the community, and mailing lists (particularly ones which enforce a strong âtext onlyâ culture) are a significant stumbling block for many people.
What I donât think is necessarily relevant is drawing inferences from IRC and applying them to mailing lists (and even more so to the question of switching from mailing lists to Discourse). The two cases are extremely different. We should take the principles, but not the conclusions.
Whether that argues in favour of Discourse I donât know. I find Discourse frustrating and a barrier to participation in some ways that mailing lists arenât, but itâs certainly true that Iâve evolved working practices that suit the existing mailing list approach. And we need to remember that community isnât just (or even mostly) about tools, itâs about people - and if switching to a new technology drives away a good part of the âold guardâ, we have to consider whether thatâs good for the community as well - thereâs a balance between stagnating and ensuring that we learn from experience, but equally the community is poorer if thereâs no-one around who has a historical perspective.
(OK, Iâm now sounding like an old fuddy-duddy. Iâll stop at this point 
)
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Pretty much everyone I know assumes email involves rich text. Pretty much every mailing list Iâm on expects plain text. Thatâs a huge difference, in practice.
Edit: I should be clear - my point here is that âkeep mailing lists but allow rich textâ is an important middle-ground option thatâs not being considered at the moment.
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Itâs nicer to use, but I find my responses are not as in depth, because I find it harder to track the overall conversation flow. YMMV, of course 
And a big chunk of the ânicer to useâ aspect is rich text, which is perfectly usable in email, itâs just mailing list convention that blocks it.
BTW, that patronising complaint Iâm seeing next to the box Iâm typing in - âConsider replying to several posts at onceâ - is one of the really not-nice features of Discourse. I do not appreciate my tools criticising how I interact with people 
Imagine a person whoâs never used either Discourse or mailing lists. How much effort is required for them to read a thread? And letâs assume the most common scenario nowadays: they are on mobile, and someone shares a link with them. On Discourse: just click it and read in your browser, top to bottom. No barriers. Mailing lists? Either use that atrocious prehistoric web interface that people usually link to where you need to click on each message one by one, or google how to subscribe to a mailing list and do who knows how many more steps to get that thread in a readable manner. We are comparing seconds and dozens of minutes here.
I think itâs important to acknowledge the bias at play here: for experienced devs, that is knowledge they have already received long time ago. We are talking about accessibility for new members.
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I wanted to call this out specifically, because I do think it is true. Iâm sure anyone familiar with me knows that I tend to be one that is agitating for change wherever I see something that I think could be better, but even with that I do think we need to figure out that right balance. That balance could be figuring out better ways to integrate two disparate systems like a traditional mailing list and $SOME_NEW_THING, or something else entirely!
One of the reasons I tend to agitate for change as much as I do is because I always worry that in any group of people tends to self select for people who could cross whatever barriers existed to becoming a member of that community, which means weâre losing out on the perspective of the people for whom those barriers were too much to be able to successfully âconvertâ them into a community member. So my general thought process is âIf I find X thing crummy, then there is probably a non zero number of people out there who found it bad enough to just drop off completelyâ.
Iâm curious about this! Do you use a threaded email client? For me I use a flat email client so the âflowâ of a discourse thread is roughly the same as my email client, discourse just has better tools for things like quoting, rich text, etc.
Iâd probably argue that rich text is not entirely âperfectly usableâ in email. You can use it for sure, but every email client does it a little bit differently and when you start mixing them you end up with some pretty crazy output by the time youâre half way down a long thread. Even something simple like what font an email is in will change email to email, and when you start quoting etc youâll get the same email message in different fonts, with several different quoting styles, etc. So while you can do rich text in email, in practice it breaks down on long threads I think.
The funny thing is, I actually find that complaint somewhat useful If you go to mailing list threads where Iâve participated in and things got, well letâs say âpassionateâ, I can easily personally be responsible for 50% of the email in that thread alone. Thatâs a personal problem that Iâm trying to work on, because I tend to feel a need to respond to everyone opposed to something I want, to talk about why I disagree with their points and to hopefully convince them. This happens less naturally in Discourse since I can multi quote in a reasonable fashion so if I come back to 5 messages, I can reply to all 5 in one message, but I still do sometimes do rapid fire responses. That little notice helps me remember to step away a bit and let others weigh in too.
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I think it would be useful to define the usage model a bit better here. You seem to concentrate on how easy it is to read a discussion. I am more interested in how easy and productive it is to participate.
I would also criticize your assumptions. You say âbeing on mobileâ is the most common scenario nowadays. I doubt thatâs true in the context of python-dev. I think few people develop software directly from their smartphone or tablet interface. Perhaps some of them will want to read software-related discussions on their mobile device, but for most purposes when developing software, the primary form of interaction device is through the laptop or desktop computer.
Iâll note that Mailman 3 has made an effort to have a more modern and feature-rich Web interface, including the ability to post directly from the Web interface. How efficient that is, I donât know, as I am just used to the regular way of interacting with mailing-lists, but it exists, and is actively maintained. (ccâing @barry on this)
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No, I use gmailâs web interface, which is about as lacking in features as youâre ever likely to get.
I donât honestly know quite why I find mailing lists easier to follow. I think itâs the tendency towards more quoting, or greater depth of quotes. Itâs definitely mainly about how people structure their replies rather than the UI (although scrolling a long thread on Discourse with the way it hides things really sucks).
Reading and responding to recent posts is OK in Discourse - itâs referring back to older points thatâs a pain - which is why I say my responses end up âshallowerâ.
Certainly itâs not a perfect answer (and rich text does not integrate well with mailing list style quoting in my experience). But the point is that âDiscourse can do bullet points! And images! Etc.â isnât really about Discourse per se. Itâs great to have, but thereâs other ways of getting it.
That oneâs actually not bad (there are others that are really annoying, like the one about quoting a URL repeatedly, when Iâm only including it because it was in someone elseâs text that I quoted!) but itâs essentially pushing me to discard my reply (or post something half-completed, thereâs no way I know of to keep a âdraftâ reply for later) so that I can respond later once Iâve collated information from a number of other comments - which as I pointed out above, I find really hard to do because of the thing about reviewing older posts.
Well, sort of. Only to one level, though, so if I try to find the original context of quotes in a multi-quoted message, I find I get lost very quickly. Having said that I just discovered that itâs possible to âexpandâ a quote block to get context. Thatâs a good example of a non-obvious feature in Discourse that if you havenât found it, the interface sucks for you in ways that other people arenât aware of 
And part of âaccessible to new usersâ is about not having features like this which are hidden unless you are âin the knowââŚ
This is a very good point. We really need to be very clear on priorities here - are we trying to find an effective medium for readers or participants (writers)? Obviously âbothâ would be ideal, but which do we favour in trade-offs? Further, participants can be divided into people who want to add in-depth comments, and people who just want to express relatively low-content âI agreeâ sentiments. A âlikeâ-type system is suitable for such people.
I genuinely wonder whether having multiple communications channels is actually the best solution here. Fragmented discussions is a big issue, but so are some of the other things weâre talking aboutâŚ
I just want to point out that discourse will save drafts serverside for you. You donât have to do anything special itâs all done automatically. I think the limitations are you can have 1 in progress draft reply per topic, and only 1 in progress draft for a totally new topic. Since this is saved server side it will follow you between devices.
Thatâs not negating your feedback, just thought Iâd point it out incase it made Discourse easier for you
I think that we skipped some of the natural onboarding in Discourse because we have an existing community. I could be remembering wrong, but I think as you work up in âtrust levelsâ it prompts you to discover different capabilities and tries to reward you for learning them (through gamification which people have varying, often strong, opinions on). I think we bypassed that for core committers because we put them in a group that automatically inferred a high trust level. I could be wrong about that though, since I skipped all of that onboarding too, I just seem to remember that it existed when I looked years ago.