[Haskell-cafe] [ANN] Haskell.Org Discourse Instance

[Bryan Richter]

[I drafted this when the announcement was made. Activity on Discourse has
been growing slowly, so I thought I'd go ahead and post it now.]

I think this is great. I've been part of a few of the mentioned communities
that transitioned to Discourse, and a few others as well. The most positive
change has been the increase in community participation.

As someone initially more comfortable with Mailman mailing lists, I
empathize with people who have strong email workflows. Moving to Discourse
isn't painless. (There is a "mailing list mode", which helps some, but not
entirely.) A web UI has some downsides compared to text, for those so
inclined.

But there are upsides as well. Threads are more isolated from each other,
and are effectively dynamically-created mini-mailing lists. You can edit
your posts, removing typos or clarifying points.[1] Worrying about top
posting becomes obsolete. (I recognize the irony here, but I am on mobile,
so....)

But like I said, the biggest upside is improved community participation. As
an anecdote, I know people who cared deeply about a particular project, but
never felt comfortable enough with the mailing list interface to chime in.
Forums, for whatever combination of reasons, are more approachable. (I even
feel this myself, which is perhaps why the anecdote resonates with me.)
Plus, Discourse provides richer means of communication through reactions,
and it is better equipped to facilitate moderation and disputes.[2]

I'm not sure what prompted me to write this fawning email, except that I
wrote a very similar one when Nix started their trial, and now they've
switched away from their mailing list completely and everything seems to be
going quite well. I encourage people to give Discourse a go!

P.s. Discourse would never replace all means of communication, but it could
potentially replace all discussion-based mailing lists.

[1]: The ability to edit posts can also be abused, but in practice this
rarely happens.

[2]: Moderation can also be abused, but its absence is more frequently the
problem!

On Fri, 22 Feb 2019, 15.27 Jasper Van der Jeugt, <m at jaspervdj.be> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> We would like to announce a new discourse-based forum for the Haskell
> community, at:
>
>     https://discourse.haskell.org/
>
> This is inspired by the Rust, Nix and Elm discourse instances, where
> these forums have had a strong positive effect on the community. We will
> run this as a "beta" for 6 months and then evaluate its usefulness. It
> is meant as an extra alternative to Haskell-cafe, reddit and Haskell
> IRC, but it does not replace any of those.
>
> Discourse is completely open source and easily accessible using an email
> client. We would like to thank the Haskell.Org admin team for
> provisioning a server and Matthew Pickering for suggesting this and
> doing the hard work setting up the instance.
>
> Warm regards,
> Jasper Van der Jeugt
> on behalf of the Haskell.Org Committee
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