I was on several mailing lists that I would occasionally answer questions on when something popped up that I could help with. Most of these moved over to forums over time. I have no interest in popping in to a bunch of different forums everyday to answer questions. I still pop in when I have a question myself but I find the chance of getting a helpful answer has reduced.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

im the opposite, i find it hard to keep up with long email threads, but throw a few forums and pages on rss...

[–] AustralianSimon@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

Plus lots of them get indexed

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Oh no, not Discourse :( I never liked Discourse. I guess mainly for the UI and UX/navigation.

Still likely an improvement for approachability. For a mailing list you essentially need pre-knowledge and a client to use reasonably well. A [Discourse] forum may need an account, but is hosted and straight-forward.

Given that it's already established I see why the question of alternative forms and platforms wouldn't even come up.

[–] fr0g@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago

A [Discourse] forum may need an account, but is hosted and straight-forward.

Discourse is also working on a Fediverse integration. So at some point you might not even need extra forum accounts.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago

If they use the fediverse integration that discourse is working on, it'll be fine.