Re: Anyone newly interested in Debian - you're welcome here
On Fri, 11 Jul 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.
>
> 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
>
> --
> This signature is currently under constuction.
>
doesn't this all sound like what i've heard called "self rule"
i also hear that doesn't work
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