Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Easy. Mailing lists are essentially one -> many. On a technical mailing
list, say debian-devel :) , discussion may be tightly focussed. Context is
missing, you've got a minimalist text. Post something violently off-topic
and you'll potentially get flamed. Others will just ignore you / skip over
your name in a thread. Say something on topic which is ad hominem or can be
interpreted as an attack on one person's views - you'll get some pitching
in to defend that person, others directly flaming you, others flaming the
amount of flames and bandwidth used up. Context is all. Occasionally,
something fairly minor can push someone to say "Not worthwhile". Forums are
generally understood to have wider readership and may have more topics
going on. That said, I can't understand the extensive popularity of fora -
but nor can I understand the idea that one size fits all. There's also
ephemerality - I may say things one way on an archived mailing list with a
relatively limited circulation and where I can refer back to previous
discussions, something differently on an ephemeral forum, but have to think
quite carefully about a blog posting to a really wide audience