Say you want to contribute to a project and find out the only way to do so is by discussing the issue on IRC or the mailing list, then submitting the patch per email.
Mailing lists intimidate me but I haven’t ever tried to communicate by one. IRC is probably fine.
I’ll be honest though, I’m not going to submit a patch to a mailing list unless there are pretty clear and easy instructions. Forking a project and opening a pull request on whatever forge (like GitHub, GitLab, and others) is easy. I probably do it once every three months or so when I find a bug I know I can fix. Mailing lists are just enough trouble (with my current level of understanding) that I’m probably not going to do it.
I’ll give an example. I found a bug in the JDK that was fixed in 17 but not in 11 and I was trying to figure out how to report it or backport it myself. It was crazy the amount of hoops I needed to jump through and I gave up. I’m not saying the project should be different so it fits my needs or anything, I’m just using this as an example of hurdles discouraging me from contributing. I think the vast majority of devs are probably at the same place and don’t want to fool with mailing lists. (I’m not saying projects should stop using them.)
To anyone interested, there is a comprehensive tutorial about how to use Git with email to contribute to projects like these.
Agree with many of the other comments here saying that they’d be very wary of such a project based on what these choices say about the project’s maintainers. Something else is that while I have real affection for email and particularly IRC based on past experience, I don’t think these two are without problems. Email is so asynchronous that many folks feel obligated to treat writing messages to a list more formally. This is not totally misguided since everyone subscribed gets this message delivered to them. IRC, on the other hand, is so synchronous that you should reasonably worry if anyone will be there to talk with, and about whether or not there are searchable archives.
Something (like GitHub) that can be quick but is also perfectly serviceable for asynchronous communication really does have advantages, imho.
I spent a lot of time and energy doing that years ago and don’t want to do it anymore. Mailing lists suck because you’re subscribed to a billion things you don’t want to hear about. IRC…honestly…the world has just moved past it.
I’m sad the world moved past IRC. It was always chock full of tech geniuses and underground nerd shit. The normies can have discord
I’m still amazed that people consider proprietary app Discord the successor to IRC
IRC is fine, so are mailing lists; I use both, plus various git forges, to contribute to open source projects.
IRC is still going strong on OFTC and Libera.chat
I get that the younger folks like discord, but seriously it’s a proprietary mess that locks everything behind a wall and tries to extract payment from each and every user.
If you host thelounge using IRC is quite cool. As you get a better experience with backed up messages and stuff.
Lounge looks pretty cool
Both are heavy targets of spamming and take considerable effort to maintain
I agree with those saying mailing lists are intimidating. I don’t know if others are using dedicated tools or something but I find web based mailing list UIs just incomprehensibly bad and difficult to navigate.
Most web-based mailing list UIs are honestly incredibly bad, but you don’t need to use them, you can choose any email client you want.
The problem with mailing lists is that no mailing list provider ever supports “subscribe to this message tree”.
As a result, either you get constant spam, or you don’t get half the replies.
