Re: On improving mailing list [was: How to Boot Linux ISO Images Directly From Your Hard Drive Debian]
Hello,
On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 02:51:02AM +0200, Linux-Fan wrote:
> I think that switching support over to a different medium i.e. from e-
> mail to Q&A-style will see a different sort of user participating.
> Hence, the "community" one would find on the Q&A site is not there yet. This
> explains why it would not be used much (initially) even if there was a lot
> of advertisement.
If we are talking about the pool of people asking the questions and
answering them, I'm not sure that so many would be left behind. I do
get the impression that those new to Linux do feel pretty
comfortable on web sites and less so on email lists. I actually know
a lot of people in their 20s and 30s now who don't really have an
email address, only for use as credentials on web sites!
I don't want to harp on about it but Ask Ubuntu does some good
numbers on daily answers marked solved. Also I've spotted quite a
few names from here on some of those Stack sites. :-)
If the new people don't actually know the thing exists it won't get
used though.
The other kind of participant, who's here mainly for debate, will I
guess still be here debating. Which I don't see as a problem.
> As far as I can tell, Debian's development communication mostly uses e-mail
> (for bugs, mailing lists, announcements) and IRC (for real-time
> communication e.g. release testing). Hence it seems only natural that e-mail
> and IRC would be the primary means to ask for help, too. The idea behind
> this is (in theory?) that the developers use the same means of communication
> as the users.
The first thing I would say to that though is that all those places
have much more rigidly defined topics than here. I don't know about
IRC, but I'm in many of those other places and off-topicness isn't
much of a problem there. Neither do they tend to see an influx of
low experience new users.
For discussion, email is king, I'm with you there, never do get on
well with web forums. I really like to see topics enforced though.
It's interesting that even in the extremely technical community of
Linux kernel development, there is increasing call for patch
submission and management by web interface rather than email:
https://lwn.net/Articles/811528/
https://lwn.net/Articles/860607/
(I mention this only as an aside and don't see it as really relevant
when talking about user support.)
> Where does the notion that the mailing list is the primary support channel
> stem from?
Personally I see people being pointed to it all the time when they
ask user-level questions in some other Debian email space.
I've been on IRC since 1995 but I don't hang around in any of the
mainstream Debian channels so I'm not aware of what they're like.
I can well imagine that someone looking for assistance does a search
and finds https://www.debian.org/support where the first part talks
about a thing that seems obscure and requires software they probably
never used before. The next one down is email, and everyone's heard
of email even if they only use it to log in to Netflix.
> I even tried out Reddit for a few weeks but noticing how much data they
> collect just by my clicks on up/down and choice of topics to read is quite a
> revelation. Both, mailing-lists and IRC are in a way more public that
> everything one sends is published for all to read but also more private in
> that what one does not intend to send (which messages I read and how long I
> take for it for instance) stays private.
I do think it is important for Debian to self-host where it can. The
privacy aspect is critical as so many third party web services are
primarily about selling the users' personal data and their activity
than the actual service they purport to provide.
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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