
Ask HN: What happened to mailing lists and message boards? - andybak
The last dozen or so open source projects I&#x27;ve become interested in all seem to say the same kind of thing under &quot;Community&quot; or &quot;Support&quot; or &quot;Get Involved&quot; and it strikes me as odd.<p>It&#x27;s something along the lines of &quot;Join our Discord&quot; (or Slack or similar).<p>Back in the day projects usually offered a synchronous and a non-synchronous forum for discussion. Django had a mailing list and an IRC channel.<p>Now - I can understand how Discord and Slack have ended up replacing IRC but somewhere along the way we&#x27;ve lost the asynchronous option. The one that&#x27;s searchable, structured. The one you check to see if the thing you&#x27;re asking has already been asked a hundred times. The one that has permanence.<p>Can someone explain why this has happened and if I&#x27;m alone in feeling like something has been lost?<p>I might be looking to start a community around a project myself soon and my instinct is to start something like a forum or mailing list and only tack on chat if there&#x27;s a call for it and sufficient number of people.<p>Will everyone under 30 look at me like I&#x27;m mad? Do people still use these things?
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decafninja
Some combination of Reddit, Facebook groups, etc. seems to have subsumed them.

