On Jul 11, 2025, Loris Bennett wrote: > 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. Do they have an IRC bridge? :) > [...] > 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 Youngsters don't know, and need to be taught. Yeah IRC/Slack/etc. is nice for "right now" type communication (or a phonecall *gasp*), but when you forget that thing you discussed 6 months ago... > 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. Pretty sure I convinced "Mail" (or whatever it's called on the phone) to pull the directory this list gets dumped into once. But trying to type anything longer than 1-2 sentences on that thing is absolutely awful. -- |_|O|_| |_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert |O|O|O| PGP: DDAB 23FB 19FA 7D85 1CC1 E067 6D65 70E5 4CE7 2860
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