Debian discusses Discourse

We recently migrated to Discourse at work. I'm a heavy custom-MUA user (mutt) and used slrn to keep on top of lists (when I was doing that). Some things that I like about Discourse:

- I can subscribe to get only the first message in any thread. Since they "automute" after this, filtering out things uninteresting to me is *far* easier as I don't keep getting updates to things I already deemed unimportant. Nevermind getting hooked into a thread after I've deleted the start of the thread I previously deemed useless.
- I'm not juggling Nx the number of lists versus projects (usually -announce, -devel, and -users). Instead of yet another private list or (worse) direct private emails (where information goes to die a lonely death), we can just use a restricted section of Discourse.
- Cross-referencing between those "lists" if a cinch. (As is moving threads if someone starts off in the wrong place.)
- Replies which are "solutions" to the original problem are marked as such. This makes figuring out if a thread is "done" or not is also very easy.
- Top-posting is essentially gone (not-quoting is still a thing, but that's not new).
- I don't get multi-meg images dumped into my email. Then quoted and duplicated for the rest of the thread.
- Engagement is way up. Mostly on the user side where other users seem much more ready to reply to questions with answers before I have to spend time on it. I can just look at the "solution" reply, maybe add a clarification, and then I can ignore the rest instead of the thread without spending time reading it all. Development discussions seem to be about level.
- Jumping in on an existing thread is much easier. I hate having to craft headers to hook my reply into a thread that started before I subscribed. This allows new users to answer old questions too (something I've ~never seen elsewhere except forum software and hard-core nntp users).
- I don't have to tell others to CC me on a thread where I have list delivery turned off.
- 2FA support. And no more "here's your password in plain text" emails every month.

Most of my gripes have been mentioned elsewhere in the discussion and are largely the same. One other thing I dislike is that there's no "I've already gone through this" escape hatch for the "welcome to Discourse" bot upon signing up.

I think if you're in a dev-heavy environment (e.g., patch slinging, intricate threading becomes a thng), lists can work, but if you have users who just want to ask a question or two and then leave, a list is a very poor tool (imagine having to watch or subscribe to a repo before being able to file an issue). Once we had the user lists migrated, the dev lists weren't that much more to move over as well, but our traffic is probably more heavily weighted to user discussion than dev. Other projects with different balances may rather keep the dev list. But end-user interactions are *far* better on Discourse IME.