Re: Anyone newly interested in Debian - you're welcome here
John Dow <johnmdow@me.com> writes:
> On 11 Jul 2025, at 09:58, Anssi Saari <anssi.saari@debian-user.mail.kapsi.fi> wrote:
>
> Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> writes:
>
> I think it's worth considering the fact that new computer users are
> increasingly less likely to use email and are more likely to find email
> intimidating.
>
> Do you have a proposal then for a forum (as in, a platform for group
> discussion) that's more palatable to the youngsters?
>
> TikTok, with all the information they need in useful 4 second bites :-)
>
> Seriously, though, we’re all been frustrated by the changes happening to the web in general - it used to be you’d search for information
> and get lots of links to actual written documentation, but now you get a blend of AI generated nonsense or a ‘YouTube personality’
> (whose channel seems to be just running through the installer of different distros).
>
> What a mailing list like this produces is a searchable archive of knowledge. I mean, look:
>
> https://lists.debian.org/search.html
>
> Imagine that! All the knowledge that gets shared here is searchable on a web page :)
>
> Granted, I’m an old fuddy-duddy who’s been using Linux since day 1 (and UNIX before then), but email is the *perfect* medium for this
> type of interaction.
I'm am also an old fuddy-duddy and involved from the fringes in a
project to allow the automation of building mainly scientific software
for HPC clusters. Most the other people associated with the project
will probably not be really young, with around 40% sys admins and 30% in
IT support.
The main communication used to be via a mailing list. However, a Slack
channel was introduced 7 years ago and now, according the latest yearly
survey in which usually around 100 people participate, only around 14%
of the people involved are subscribed to the mailing list.
The core developers seem very keen on Slack and as they are doing a
great job providing software which has probably saved me many hundreds
of hours of fairly mind-numbing work, so I am not one to criticize their
choice of tool.
However, for people like me, who only contribute infrequently and often
just have questions, the move to Slack seems very unfortunate, since the
posts there get deleted after 90 days. That seem to me a huge step
backwards when compared to a mailing list, which, as John says, can form
a repository of knowledge going back decades. Despite this, to me,
glaringly massive disadvantage, there are obviously many people who
probably use email on a day-to-day basis but still prefer Slack to the
mailing list.
So I don't think the issue is just "youngsters", who are in my
experience form fairly heterogenous group anyway, but more of a failure
of understanding what exactly a mailing list is and what its advantages
are. This problem may be exacerbated by the fact that there is not "an
app" to use mailing lists, which may prevent people from engaging with
the concept.
Cheers,
Loris
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