A friend and former cow-orker of mine (who is also a big open source advocate) has ran FreeLists [0] for, I dunno, 15 years or more. I don't know that it gets much easier than that.
> FreeLists provides the internet community with Free, no-hassle, high-quality mailing lists. We don't use advertisements and we don't charge for higher-than-a-certain-volume lists.
A mailing list reader/aggregator would be a good start, i.e. something to bring all mailing lists into one place and make them searchable/readable as threads. I know there are options on Linux, but I'm talking about a web-based one with 2018 standards, that even JS devs can use.
And that is/was Gmane. But it's dying a slow death due to disinterest. You can access it via the NNTP protocol.
Re:Mailing lists vs Github
by brongondwana on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @10:57AM
(#17238242)
There is! https://www.topicbox.com/
It's for pay though. It also provides a JMAP interface, so you can programatically access messages (as well as having permalinks with the message and thread IDs in them)
It's not 100% designed for this usecase, but it's definitely got the nicest archive view format of any mailing list manager I've ever used.
(disclaimer: I haven't worked directly on it, but I am a part owner of the company which wrote it)
Re:Mailing lists vs Github
by chrismorgan on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:33PM
(#17244170)
For reference, here is an example of a large open source project that uses Topicbox for its mailing lists: https://illumos.topicbox.com/
I think this is the elephant in the room. If there were a way of setting up a listserv that were as easy as creating a GitHub project then mailing lists would have a chance of taking off.