GNOME drops mailing lists end of this month

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2022-10-21 at 16:08 +0100, Colin Law wrote:
> Why are you bothered if all you use is Evolution?  Presumably you will
> only use it occasionally so what does it matter if discourse is not
> entirely to your liking.  Just put up with it on the odd occasion when
> you need to use it.

Hi,

mailing lists are good, since somebody always provides a little heads-
up. A huge official mailing list community stays in touch. Unofficial
mailing lists or forums are something completely different, that doesn't
work as good as a mailing list, at least not for BSD/Linux users in
favour of email, who don't want t use a web browser to join a forum,
just to stay in touch related to topics about an email client.

The subscribers of GNOME's official Evolution mailing list tested
Discourse today, by using it's mailing list feature.

I'm not allowed to sent mails to the list, since I don't have got enough
social credit points. To earn those credit I need to use the forum
without email. I "subscribed" to the "Evolution" tag, but got "Nautilus"
related emails.

A subscribe who is allowed to send emails, he's already at Level 1,
while I'm still at Level 0, reached the limit for replies, because he's
a Discourse novice, too. Actually we are all mailing list subscribers
for a decade or more, now enforced to join a faked mailing list with
limitations, a Social Credit System that spams the users with unrelated
messages, e.g. by messages that are related to GNOME's file manager.

Users aren't subscribed for a very long time to a mailing list, because
it's just "occasionally" wanted. An announcement 11 days before the list
gets dropped without providing a good replacement is Vogon-ish [1].

I wonder what other users think about this. In my opinion it affects
Ubuntu a lot (not Ubuntu flavours using different environments ;).

However, GNOME is important for a lot of BSD and Linux infrastructure,
in the end it affects all BSD and Linux users in some way, if the GNOME
community is torn to pieces.

Regards,
Ralf

[1] “There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning
charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning
department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had
plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to
start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been
to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light
years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an
interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the
demolition beams.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy