Yeah, there is something of a distinction between a communication channel for something that's already "made it", and a project that still needs a low barrier to entry. You can impose higher hurdles for people to jump over to participate without really losing much if your project is already 'famous'.

However, if you're trying to gain traction, having something that's easy to get started with is important, and Google Groups fits that bill pretty well: 1) people with Google accounts can sign up easily. 2) You can treat it as either a web-based forum, or a mailing list, which allows people to interact in the way that's best for them.

Indeed, I just switched Hecl over to using Google Groups, from a SourceForge mailing list, and so far I'm reasonably happy, despite a few spam problems.

> there is something of a distinction between a communication channel for something that's already "made it"

> MADE IT

This was true for us even on a small student-organized webapp project. Even some of the guys on the team protested using MailMan and went on safari looking for alternatives while we were prototyping, then when the project was officially adopted by the college and all students were told "yeah, the old channels exist, but this is a new, officially sanctioned channel also", suddenly there was a lot more activity on MailMan.

A group I'm invovled in did the same thing.

"This is a mailing list, not a discussion forum. Just post it to the Google Group."

I was really, really confused.