Mailing lists are superior for async communications IMHO for endeavors such as this. Nothing needs to be addressed immediately (and as everyone is a volunteer, realistic expectations should be set for response latency; email helps that, Slack/Discord does not), and the mailing list archive is a natural log of conversations and decisions that are open and accessible (Free Slack only keeps 10k lines of conversation history if I recall). A mailing list is also free (can be, not always, but can be), and does not require a chat client installed.

Mailing lists was superior in 90's-00's, now when discourse/slack/discord/etc exists there's no reason to use ML except nostalgia. Parsing tons of new emails isn't easy.

Also I'm prefer to avoid Google services 'cause privacy issues.

I soured on discord/slack/etc when their absurdly bad performance caused my laptop to get so hot it probably neutered me.

Seriously though, those services are fine on a powerful tower PC plugged into the wall, but if you're on the move on battery power, they are unbearable.

Try https://cancel.fm/ripcord/, if you want to give them a try.

I like the combo of regular forum (Xenforo, Discourse, etc) and chat (Discord, Slack, etc). Unlike mailing lists, modern forums are actually usable, fun to use, and appealing. And chat provides a place for more conversational community-building.

For example, the Elm community has both. The Discourse forum is technical and business-only yet there's a clean record of these discussions. The Slack chat is where I hang out, get to know people, and participate in more relaxed chit chat about Elm, webdev, and building applications.

Elm used to just have a mailing list but it was obsoleted and shut down with the creation of the Slack group and Discourse forum which were far more popular.

Well discourse forum and matrix chat bridged to IRC through riot.im works very effectively in our open source community.

What do you mean when you say "modern forums are fun to use"? I ask in 100% good faith and I am not being snarky.

They have all sorts of modern features more conducive to discussion and community-building like notifications that someone @mention/replied to you and even editing your post -- features that people generally like. If you don't think that's "fun", fair enough, but I also enumerated other benefits like their broader appeal.

Any community that only has a mailing list could benefit from experimenting with a proper forum. I've seen this experiment broaden a community time and time again as you move away from only selecting for the type of person who likes mailing lists. And notice that HN isn't a mailing list either.

For example, I would imagine that the sort of people interested in high-quality ebooks extend beyond mailing list loving super-techies. Even a subreddit would be a nice option.

My question was simply about how much fun you experience using modern forums. I have never edited a post and thought it was fun.

Some people might say it's useful and others might say it encourages people to comment first and possibly focus on polishing the comment second.

For start... they aren't a freaking mailing list?

E-mail sucks.

It is bearable when using an efficient client like Ripcord.

You don't know how much I agree. I used Ripcord the other day and forgot software could just be fast. Slack feels like a boulder in comparison.

It's not very full-featured yet, but it's so fantastic I want to pay for it. It's a shame the companies themselves don't offer clients like it.

Counterpoint: Old mailing list conversations are difficult to parse and encourage a "ignore it until the issue goes away" mentality if no one is enforcing a reply rate.

Mailing lists only really work for corporations imo

We're talking open source/free/non-profits here. No reply rate should be enforced unless by project owners (their time, their project, their rules). Some issues should be ignored until they go away. I myself ignore issues from some folks who engage me in my role as an open source tooling maintainer, after I have exhausted my patience working with them and they are not receptive to polite discussion.

> Mailing lists only really work for corporations imo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_mailing_list

We've steered off topic though. Feel free to email me if you want to chat further on the topic.

Fascinating subject. It seems like the difference between slack/discord and email, is the difference between a water cooler conversation and an actual sit down meeting.

There's also IRC for water cooler conversations in an open protocol.

> Feel free to email me if you want to chat further on the topic.

Is there any way we can contact you on slack or discord instead?

Why would you force people to use nonfree proprietary software in order to contribute to an open project?

That's a good point. I find Zulip better than Slack/Discord for discourse (even better than mailing lists, with some caveats, and it's Apache-licensed:

https://zulipchat.com/

I knew about Zulip but wasn’t aware of the free hosted plan. I can truly see it now as an alternative for orgs who can’t afford running these things themselves.

I use the free hosted plan and intend to pay for it when I need more features. It's excellent.

IRC?

Free as in "Google"?

With mailing lists, users can use any mail client regardless of server side.

?

Guessing the implication being that Google is ultimately not "free" w/ respect to your personal data and how it is used.

Yes but how does Google enter into this?

It doesn't directly, only as a meme, or archetype. The same way that beer is not directly related to the concept of gratis, but you still use it in the illustrative phrase "free as in beer".

The mailing list is provided by Google Groups

Help! Help! I’m being forced to use non free proprietary software!

Can just have both.

I was hoping I could contribute financially, which could help fund any software or hosting costs they have, but it doesn't look like they're accepting donations (which is also fine, and completely their prerogative).

But! If someone from SE is reading this and it turns out that you just don't have a way to donate because it doesn't seem like people will donate, definitely put a paypal button or something out there. :)

We have minimal hosting costs (ebooks are small) and no software costs, so the rest is just down to time. Luckily, the majority of the process is proof reading, which it turns out people quite enjoy doing regardless, and is easily parallelisable our across multiple contributors.

So so far not need for contributions, and it makes things simpler to not need them.

If your hosting costs ever mount, I can recommend Hetzner for hosting, they'll give you a whole bunch of bandwidth for free on their smallest plan ($3/mo) and you can even buy a 3 Tb pipe (IIRC) you can saturate for $20ish a month.

Otherwise, I'm sure some organization will be happy to provide some bandwidth in exchange for a shoutout.

> they use "straight" quotes instead of “curly” quote

why care?

I don't mean this ironically, I really don't understand why would anyone care about such things?

So, not about curly vs straight quotes, but about whether to use en-dash, em-dash, minus, or hyphens on Wikipedia. For example, what mark do you put in "Mexican-American War"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...

Here's a lengthy village pump discussion, with no outcome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...

Look at the word counts for some of the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...

Some of these discussions end up on Arbcom which is pretty severe: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...

It seems a lot of people do care, passionately, about the difference between "" and “”.

Language and typography are art. Proper typography is more aesthetically pleasing.