@jwildeboer mailing lists and IRC channels are like the opposite of accessible

to elaborate:

IRC is unusable on mobile internet connections, or on multiple devices at once, doesn't keep any history and has none of the features you would expect from a chat protocol in 2024 (yes bouncers exist but they are extremely convoluted to set up and often assume you have some arcane knowledge on how IRC works that doesn't seem to be actually documented anywhere)

Mailing lists clutter your inbox with tons of discussion you don't care about and are very difficult to read especially when a thread splits into multiple branches.
The best way I've seen of solving it is to display threads like Reddit or Misskey does, but I have never seen anyone implement a way to read mailing lists like that. Most forum software just ignores the problem by not supporting any way of "forking" a discussion, which results in terrible, impossible to follow threads where every other post quotes some previous post related to a different topic (see XDA-developers).
Also my email provider would ask me to pay up for the volume of received email if I joined a few mailing lists each receiving dozens of messages a day.

If a project requires me to join a mailing list to contribute I will simply not contribute to the project. Git forges exist for a reason, they provide really good UX for merge requests and issue tracking.