Debian discusses Discourse

I receive a large volume of email as well. I found that prioritizing emails with my own address in the To: and CC: lines, and one or two carefully chosen lists, was sufficient, and nearly all of my other filters are just quality-of-life "skip the inbox" filters. I've got several thousand unread emails in my inbox at any given time, and I'm not too concerned about reading most of them, because I already read all of the messages that I actually need to care about. The rest, I just let float by into the ether, occasionally plucking one from the stream of detritus if the subject line looks interesting. I'm sure this sounds horrifying and uncivilized to some readers, but I read all the email I need to read, and I don't read the rest. Isn't that what a filtering strategy is meant to accomplish?

> Yes, there was a learning curve for this stuff, and maintaining it takes some time and effort, but in return, I gain efficiencies that pay for themselves many, many times over in the form of (much!) higher personal productivity.

I'm well aware of this general concept; I have a highly tricked out zshrc and a moderately tricked out vimrc. I just don't see much point in extending that effort to email when the only benefit is making the number next to my inbox folder smaller (as opposed to, say, allowing me to execute commands or edit text with fewer keystrokes, which directly increases my productivity).

> It was not my intent to call all forums crappy, just that Discourse with those "engagement" features turned off amounts to little more than a relatively crappy example of a forum, with an even crappier implementation of a mailing list tacked onto it. In other words, turn those features off, and there are better forums, and much better mailing lists.

That's certainly fair, and I'm not sufficiently experienced with forum software to comment here. My concern, however, is that nobody is discussing any forum-like alternatives as far as I can see from limited skimming of the Debian discussion (as I mentioned above, there's a laundry list of reasons why these discussions are hard to read as a non-participant, so I may have missed something). And it's likely that many of the same arguments you and others are making against Discourse would translate to most other forum software packages as well (none of them are going to support POP3 or SMTP, for example, so you won't be hooking your MUA up to the forum).

As a result, I fear the "older" open source and free software communities may reject forums altogether, and wall themselves off into an aging and disfavored protocol. SMTP already requires numerous weird extensions to the RFC just to make it slightly harder to send spam, and its encryption story has never made much sense in comparison to HTTPS. Meanwhile, web-based technologies get more powerful and modern every year. Meanwhile, the "younger" open source (mostly) communities will embrace GitHub et al. and refuse to even have mailing lists, which creates a worst-of-both-worlds scenario wherein Debian developers (and anyone else in the "distro" space) have to constantly context-switch between their MUAs and their browsers to interact with each other and upstreams respectively. There's also a serious risk of email ceasing to effectively federate, as more and more anti-spam measures are piled on top of a system that was never designed for a global, trustless internet. I don't think this is happening any time soon, but nobody appears to be planning for it at all.

There are problems with web-based tech, too. Federation is usually poor to nonexistent (unless you count dumb hyperlinking), many sites are bloated beyond all reason, the web is increasingly a Chrome/Chromium monoculture, and it's not clear that anyone actually cares about any of these problems enough to do something about them. However, if all of the people who most strongly object to those issues simply avoid using the web entirely, then the web will continue to develop without their input, and things will get worse.