Re: [Evolution] Discourse and the situation for Mailman lists hosted by Gnome.org

[Ralf Mardorf <silver bullet zoho com>]

On Sun, 2022-10-23 at 09:20 -0400, William Oliver wrote:
> I strongly suspect that the reason this change is being made is not for
> some nefarious "control" reason or some bad goal.  I suspect that its
> about making it easier for whoever is volunteering to keep this stuff
> going.

Hi,

if so, why was it possible to sent the announcement to the mailing lists
at 20 Oct 2022, but impossible to do it earlier, to give the communities
a chance to run their own lists?

The moderators and subscribers of the lists hosted by GNOME are
volunteers, too. "They" gave us less than 2 weeks to find a solution
that satisfies another part of the communities.

The non-profit GNOME Foundation is not a small project by a few coders,
it is a relatively huge foundation.

All support forums of proprietary software, let alone FLOSS software,
that I know, stay away from gamification, "an allegedly
populist idea that actually benefits corporate interests over those of
ordinary people" [1]. GNOME is the only exception that I know, that only
provides support by Discourse. I've seen that FreeBSD has a Discourse
forum, too, but they continue with all kinds of other support channels.
FreeBSD has a way better reason to discontinue Mailman, since it's more
or less impossible to port Mailman 3 to a FreeBSD servers, hence they
simply migrated to another mailing list software.

You might be right, but your guess isn't evident. It's hard to believe
that you are right. I have got valid doubts.

Regards,
Ralf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification#Criticism