On Fri, 11 Jul 2025, Loris Bennett wrote: > John Dow <[email protected]> writes: > >> On 11 Jul 2025, at 09:58, Anssi Saari >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Andy Smith <[email protected]> writes: >> >> I think it's worth considering the fact that new computer users are >> increasingly less likely to use email and are more likely to find email >> intimidating. >> >> Do you have a proposal then for a forum (as in, a platform for group >> discussion) that's more palatable to the youngsters? >> >> TikTok, with all the information they need in useful 4 second bites :-) >> >> Seriously, though, we’re all been frustrated by the changes happening to the >> web in general - it used to be you’d search for information >> and get lots of links to actual written documentation, but now you get a >> blend of AI generated nonsense or a ‘YouTube personality’ >> (whose channel seems to be just running through the installer of different >> distros). >> >> What a mailing list like this produces is a searchable archive of knowledge. >> I mean, look: >> >> https://lists.debian.org/search.html >> >> Imagine that! All the knowledge that gets shared here is searchable on a web >> page :) >> >> Granted, I’m an old fuddy-duddy who’s been using Linux since day 1 (and UNIX >> before then), but email is the *perfect* medium for this >> type of interaction. > > I'm am also an old fuddy-duddy and involved from the fringes in a > project to allow the automation of building mainly scientific software > for HPC clusters. Most the other people associated with the project > will probably not be really young, with around 40% sys admins and 30% in > IT support. > > The main communication used to be via a mailing list. However, a Slack > channel was introduced 7 years ago and now, according the latest yearly > survey in which usually around 100 people participate, only around 14% > of the people involved are subscribed to the mailing list. > > The core developers seem very keen on Slack and as they are doing a > great job providing software which has probably saved me many hundreds > of hours of fairly mind-numbing work, so I am not one to criticize their > choice of tool. > > However, for people like me, who only contribute infrequently and often > just have questions, the move to Slack seems very unfortunate, since the > posts there get deleted after 90 days. That seem to me a huge step > backwards when compared to a mailing list, which, as John says, can form > a repository of knowledge going back decades. Despite this, to me, > glaringly massive disadvantage, there are obviously many people who > probably use email on a day-to-day basis but still prefer Slack to the > mailing list. > > So I don't think the issue is just "youngsters", who are in my > experience form fairly heterogenous group anyway, but more of a failure > of understanding what exactly a mailing list is and what its advantages > are. This problem may be exacerbated by the fact that there is not "an > app" to use mailing lists, which may prevent people from engaging with > the concept. > > Cheers, > > Loris > > -- > This signature is currently under constuction. >
doesn't this all sound like what i've heard called "self rule" i also hear that doesn't work
