On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 07:21:54PM -0400, Simo Sorce wrote:
> Hi Matthew, you say: "We're missing people", and I think, "who?".
> And who are you going to miss if you move to discourse?
Again and again I have seen this "we're missing people" sentiment be
used to justify scrapping "old" workflows, and *not once* has it ever
resulted in "more people" coming out of the woodwork that would have
happily contributed in the past, but were turned off/away by the need to
use archaic email.
(FFS, If we're going to follow this to its logical conclusion, we should
just scrap all of this email/discourse/whatever and just move
everything to github, or even facebook, as that's clearly where the
most numbers of people are. "but no, our custom tooling makes things
better for us" is the inevitable pushback, which arguably applies just
as much to email-based flows!)
> The mailing list make messages land in my client, on which I am very
> efficient, therefore I can check all messages once a day, and respond
> if I find a worthy topic.
...and the very nature of Discourse or various other Forums pretty much
make this sort of workflow impossible; that is to say you're all but
forced to manually poll every site you care about in a way that all but
makes automation impossible.
In other words, it's locally optimal for any given site, but is utterly
incapable of scaling if you care about more than a small handful of sites.
Calling myself semi-active here would be quite generous, but I can
uneqvocibly state that if I have to manually poll a discourse site or
whatever, that will be the end of my participating in anything Fedora,
except to report bugs via abrt (assuming I don't have to keep logging in
for new API keys) I suspect I'm far from the only one in that respect.
> Unless this discourse has some great mail bridge (it doesn't) or maybe
> an rss feed (I do not use those at work, but I guess I could ?) So
> that I can skim messages on my terms, I think I (and those like me)
> will be the next "missing people".
RSS doesn't scale for higher volumes unless you're literally polling
every few minutes or the feed includes a large number of entries.
> Btw I could make exactly the same quote about any forum that Major made
> for Mailing lists, messy discussions are messy and a forum does not
> make them easier to follow by any means (perhaps except for those that
> chose inferior email readers).
Yeah.
> Your own post communicates to me (whether you intended it or not) that
> in the end the thread that will be generated by this post won't matter,
> because this is just a courtesy post and you already think that the
> opinion of the "minority of self selected mailing list lovers and
> dinosaurs" does not matter much.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with this perception. Perhaps it's
because I've seen so many other formerly e-mail based communities
bifrucate [1] chasing after "engagagement" that never occurs, or even
RH/Fedora's near-perfect abysmal record of framing core infrastructure
changes like this as a "discussion" when the decision has already been
made and will happen no matter what the masses have to say about it.
At the end of the day, distro development, like most other
infrastructure, isn't sexy or glamorous, and the humongous effort that
goes into it is rarely rewarded with anything other than abuse. "Who
cares about distros? I just use Docker containers!"
[1] Splitting into the "core" developers (ie those paid/compensated for
participating) and an endless summer of newbs seeking help/support;
the middle gets completely hollowed out.
- Solomon
--
Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
@pizza:shaftnet dot org (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL speachy (libra.chat)
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
