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Ludovic Courtès

#GNOME replaces its mailing lists with Discourse:
mail.gnome.org/archives/deskto

As someone who grew at a time where email was an unquestioned, decentralized foundation of #FreeSoftware workflows, moves like leave a bad taste in my mouth. I understand how Discourse facilitates onboarding, but the idea of delegating to a central server and using the browser as the sole user interface remains unappealing to me.

Getting old?

8 Nov 2022 at 16:32 | Open on toot.aquilenet.fr
7 comments
Ludovic Courtès

@ebassi I’ve found Discourse’s onboarding features smart—messages essentially getting you to learn the etiquette, to better understand where the other person is talking from (whether they’re a newcomer or not), and so on. It probably helps lower the barrier to entry and make interactions smoother.

(I find it intriguing though that we need such “social prostheses” in the first place; is the on-line etiquette too different from real-life interactions?)

9 Nov 2022 at 10:43 | Open on toot.aquilenet.fr
Ludovic Courtès

@khinsen @ebassi I like the idea too. Maybe Discourse’s email support goes in that direction? Delta Chat seems to be for small groups, from what I understand.

9 Nov 2022 at 11:19 | Open on toot.aquilenet.fr
Andrew Tropin

@civodul @khinsen @ebassi Do you know if Discourse supports email as a primary way of interaction? Is it possible to interact with a thread without registration on the discourse instance?

9 Nov 2022 at 12:57 | Open on fosstodon.org
Emmanuele Bassi

@abcdw @civodul @khinsen No, you can't do that. You need to have an account on the Discourse instance.

Depending on the configuration of the instance, you may also need to actually browse it and interact with it a bit to raise your user level, before you can open topics just by sending an email.

9 Nov 2022 at 13:00 | Open on mastodon.social
Andrew Tropin

@ebassi @civodul @khinsen 😔 I really like the way it looks, but don't like the fact that for each interaction with any new project I have to create an account on gitlab/gitea instance to send a simple patch or to comment on the ongoing discussion, it seems that adding one more registration requiring tool will only increase this pain.

9 Nov 2022 at 13:23 | Open on fosstodon.org
Emmanuele Bassi

@abcdw @civodul @khinsen That's not our experience. Though, of course, if you start contributing a lot to GNOME, you can ask to get an LDAP account, and then you get single-sign-on for all GNOME services.

If you're referring to being able to send patches via email, that's just false economy: you have a steep set up cost (git send-email is not a simple thing), and then you get stuck with patches over email, which is a fate worse than death.

9 Nov 2022 at 13:26 | Open on mastodon.social
Ludovic Courtès

@ebassi @khinsen @abcdw Which is “a fate worse than death” is a matter of perspective. I’m not saying patch over email doesn’t have its warts, but you’ll find many free software hackers disagree with this assessment.

9 Nov 2022 at 14:07 | Open on toot.aquilenet.fr
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