Debian discusses Discourse

I am remembering all the NNTP vs Email fights of the 1990's with people arguing that one or the other was the superior choice and would eventually be the ONE TRUE PROTOCOL. This was later replaced with Choose-Your-Forum vs Email fights of the late 1990's and early 2000's. That was then replaced with the 'Choose-Your-Social-Media' versus Email fights of the late 2000's and early 2010's. The same arguments about Email being for "old people' and Y being the new thing that only new people can understand.. fights which proverbially missed the point every time.

Each one of those would probably be a different protocol (as the Usenet people will tell you it still exists, PHPNuke people seem to show up and say 'you can always use us', the various people wanting you to move to XMPP etc keep going. ) Each of those solutions have adherents and each gets regularly replaced with some new version which is supposedly easier to use. And each solves a different way of communicating which needs a different toolset.

The problem is that we want just one tool to do all these things. It is like we all looked over the house design, saw that it was way too complex with all these pipes, and we could just use one system. Then we wonder why the sewage, hot and cold water system doesn't work as well as we envisioned and no one is happy.