User persona: potential contributor focused on a single itch

[njsmith]

There's a somewhat subtle component of the Discourse/mailing list debate that I've been thinking about after running into it a few times lately, and this might be a good place to capture it?

There are a number of projects where I'm a highly invested core maintainer, and I want to see all the issues/discussions/whatever. But there are also other areas, where I have a very strong interest in a very specific topic, but I'm not otherwise interested in subscribing to the firehose. This is one place where Github's per-issue subscriptions are great. For example, I'm subscribed to pypi/warehouse#726 and pytest-dev/pytest#935, which are tracking issues for two specific features that I care about a lot, but I'm definitely not interested in seeing everything happening in warehouse or pytest.

It's also something that mailing lists are really bad at. Concrete examples:

• How do I type a generic factory function? python/mypy#6073: in this issue I filed, Guido eventually suggested moving it over to the typing-sig list.

• proposal: Go 2: use structured concurrency golang/go#29011 (comment): here one of the core Go developers requested I open a discussion on the golang-nuts mailing list

I'd like to push these forward, but in both cases they're currently stalled out, purely because the thought of subscribing to yet another mailing list firehose fills me with unbearable malaise. (Also, subscribing and unsubscribing to mailing lists is always this annoying multi-step process – "ugh, which email address did I use?" I know it's not intentionally a dark pattern thing, but it still ends up as a major executive function tax.) So....... those contributions are just lost, I guess :-(.

Mailing lists work great for core contributors who want the firehose and who expect to remain subscribed indefinitely. But they're really unfriendly to both casual contributors, and also contributors who are highly invested in a specific topic, but where that topic doesn't equal "everything on this mailing list, forever".

I suspect this is a significant barrier to new contributors, that's invisible to core contributors.

[njsmith]

Oh, another example of how mailing lists have a subtle bias towards a "long-term investment" persona: when joining a mailing list, it's very difficult to join a discussion already-in-progress. The only people who get the privilege of replying to a post are the people who subscribed before the post was made.

[dstufft]

I completely agree with @njsmith here.

I think that one important thing to consider is how someone completely new to the project becomes invested over time. Generally when someone goes along the path from A to B, it's easier to keep them going on that path if each individual step is only a bit more effort/involvement/whatever than the previous step. I suspect that we lose a non zero number of people who might someday become core contributors by "scaring" them away by demanding too high of a commitment up front.

Of course some people are never going to want to move beyond a single issue they're invested in, but that's OK too.

[catern]

Just a drive-by comment here - sorry if this is not the kind of comments you want - but:

I'd like to push these forward, but in both cases they're currently stalled out, purely because the thought of subscribing to yet another mailing list firehose fills me with unbearable malaise.

The traditional answer to this is: You don't have to subscribe to the mailing list. Just send an email with your issue to the list, and people will keep you in Cc. It's standard practice to keep everyone in Cc - this is required for other mailing list techniques like having a conversation across multiple lists (which is very common - almost universal - in the Linux kernel community).

That's the primary traditional answer to this concern. As a tangentially relevant point, I also noticed the commit referencing this issue said:

• subtle bias towards a "long-term investment" persona: when joining a mailing list, it's very difficult to join a discussion already-in-progress. The only people who get the privilege of replying to a post are the people who subscribed before the post was made.

This is mitigated by the existence of mailing list archives/servers such as public-inbox or Gmane which allow browsing list archives in your mail client without having subscribed to the list ahead of time (such as through IMAP or NNTP). In this way one can reply to a thread in-progress without being subscribed - a typical Gmane or public-inbox user will never subscribe to the mailing list, while still being able to fully participate in it.