Re: Policy for expiring lists WAS: Idea for a secondary list server

Le 02/03/2015 21:48, Stefan Kaltenbrunner a écrit :
> On 03/02/2015 09:58 AM, damien clochard wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>> Maybe mailing lists for PUGs are a thing of the past -- perhaps we
>>>> need to be thinking on getting the @postgres twitter account to
>>>> re-tweet announcements posted by PUGs, or something like that, more
>>>> suited to today's usage of comm channels rather than 1990's.
>>>
>>> I think it would be great to supplement such lists with twitter, but
>>> the lists are used for a good bit more than broadcast announcements.
>>>
>>
>> I agree with that : Twitter (and also Meetup in a way) are top-down
>> messaging: a few individual are controling the account and broadcasting
>> news to a local user base.
>
> not only that it is also what younger people are simply used to, for a
> lot of people coming out of university mailinglists are something they
> have never come across (as a primary communication tool)
>

Assuming this is what younger people do, it does not change the fact
that the PostgreSQL community relies on mailing lists. If we want to get
more people involved in this community, we need to drag them to the
mailing lists. Or transfer the pgsql-hackers threads to twitter :-)

For many users, PUG and meetup is the first step towards contributing.
When we tell people to make this first step on google groups, meetup or
whatever, it makes things harder for them to get more invovled afterwards.

>>
>> This is probably usefull enough in many case, but I can understand that
>> some groups may want to have a more horizontal medium like a mailing list.
>>
>> In this community mailing lists are the place where most of the big
>> decisions are made. When I first got involved and I saw all the mailing
>> lists and how simple it was to join the collective effort, I remembered
>> thinking "wow this is where things happen".
>
> sure but I will again point out (as said elsewhere on the thread) that
> the overall mailinglist traffic (across all lists) is declining for
> years now and that specific to PUGs none of the recently (where recently
> is like 2 years) created lists have any traffic.
> So my point is that we are promoting/discussing the wrong thing here....
>

I was not aware that the overall traffic is decreasing. It's probably a
discussion subject on itself. Do we consider this decline as a problem ?
Do we need need to "fix" that ?

If that's a problem, I can't see why we should try to open new lists. We
can't complain that the traffic is declining and at the same time
refusing to open new channels...

To give you my experience, over the last 3 years I have opened several
mailing lists (mostly on google groups) for PostgreSQL related projects
(namely PG MAG, pgBadger, POWA, OPM, ...). Some of them are active, some
of them have a low traffic but are useful, some of them are dead.
I didn't even bother asking for a mailing list on the .org infra because
I already knew I would lead me to an endless trail of justifications.

Again I'm not arguing for opening new mailing lists at any cost. I'm
just saying things should be clear : If we don't want to open new lists,
let's just tell clearly to newcomers to go elsewhere and watch the
overall traffic decline...