Hello Polarian and all,
Just want to mention here about the 'hostile takeover' of Freenode on
IRC, by Andrew Lee, in 2021. That situation really turned me off of IRC
for some time (now I use it again, but not Freenode or even Libera).
That whole situation really seemed to have a huge negative impact on
many open source projects and communities.
-Katie
On 2025-10-26 21:58, Polarian wrote:
Hey,
Sorry for the late reply to the mailing list, been busy over the
weekend.
I recall the days when I'd wake up to a debian-user list with 300+
messages.
Many of them had nothing to do with Debian, but everything to do with
generating community.
Flame wars were magnificent, with wrecks, of what were once human
beings, lying everywhere.
And from that, the conversations that did bear on Debian were vibrant
with ideas generated that a development community could thrive on.
Debian-user isn't as much as a sad shadow of itself, now.
Latest postings bear on `why are there no postings on this list any
more?'
I don't deny that a code of conduct causes issues with communities,
especially if it is very strict, people can be too scared to contribute
to discussions.
However, I do not believe the death of mailing lists are due to code
of conducts. There's no doubt that mailing lists and IRC have been
increasing more rare within the open source community.
A larger and larger portion of open source projects are using Discord,
or another proprietary, insecure, privacy invasive platform. It has
gotten to the point where there is quite a few open source projects
which are exclusively on Discord. I can use the example of Void Linux
which shutdown their mailing list and exclusively uses Github.
I don't know Debian's communication style, nor can I say this is why
their mailing list went quiet, but I can say with quite a lot of
certainty that people moving away from open solutions and standardising
on a few or a single proprietary platform for convenience is one of the
major reasons mailing list and also IRC, are becoming ever more quiet.
Take care,
