On 10/25/25 5:51 PM, Andy Smith wrote:
Expect to see lots more of this as people stop using email. Still, at least it appears they chose Discourse. 2024 was my first year having to join a Discord to access the support community of a FOSS project, so it could be worse.
Discord is truly a horrific choice but email itself also has its issues, particularly when used as a public forum instead of direct communication between two addresses.
All mailing lists I've used so far (not that I've used many!) have had some sort of trouble with email authentication mechanisms such as DKIM, SPF. For example when I send an email to this list I get 40 DMARC reports the next day stating that they've received mail from me but with failed SPF.
Note that this is not unique to me, but everyone participating in this mailing list has to have relaxed SPF & DMARC settings otherwise they go against email best practices and their mail will be quarantined or rejected by servers that try to be discriminating without explicit whitelisting. This defeats the whole purpose of these protocols, and whitelisting is a fragile last-resort of a solution.
AFAIK ARC fixes some of these issues but it's still experimental and not widely adopted.
Considering all this I think it's fair to say that web forums have their own strengths compared to mailing lists. They also strike me as possibly more resource efficient on a global scale, but I'm not exactly sure of that.
Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of these points. Cheers, monodev