On Thu Jul 10, 2025 at 4:19 PM BST, Andy Smith wrote:
Twice this year I have had to join a Discord to get support for an
open source piece of software. Can we do better than Discord or are we
going to ignore everything that's not email until we all have to be on
Discord?
I think if there was a turning point for when email would be abandoned
by the vast majority, that point has long since passed. Although we do
get new posters here from time to time, the vast, vast majority of
people and traffic appear to be long-entrenched folk. As a proportion of
actual debian users, I think the population of this list is probably a
rounding error.
Non-the-less we haven't turned off the lists, and I don't think there's
any risk of that. So don't worry about being forced elsewhere:
especially to a closed-source platform like Discord.
(Do not confuse "Discord" with "Discourse". I really like Discourse,
and that one is open source. Ubuntu user may be familiar with it.)
Some years ago there was a short-lived experiment to set up a Discourse
instance for Debian. IMHO, the experiment was a failure because to use
something like that effectively requires more engagement with it than
was done at the time (noting that everyone concerned are volunteers and
not blaming them: I'm glad they tried, and I didn't put any of my own
effort in.)
In short I think any attempt to provide a new place for users is going
to take a serious investment of time to make sure the place is not
disregarded for being a ghost town.
--
Please do not CC me for listmail.
👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
✎ j...@debian.org
🔗 https://jmtd.net
