Trademark Actions Against the PostgreSQL Community

To get technical, the problem that you're having isn't that interacting with mailing lists is cumbersome, but rather, interacting with mailing list archives is cumbersome. You're not wrong. Web interfaces for mailing list archives haven't really changed in yonks, and there's little incentive to do so. The only people who use the archives are the people who explicitly do not interact with the list itself.

The people who actually use mailing lists, are members of the list itself, and receive the messages in their mailbox. From that point onwards, their interaction with the mailing list is only as cumbersome as their Mail User Agent (email client, MUA). Using a decent MUA that supports threading is step one to having an enjoyable experience with a mailing list.

Unfortunately, in 2021, we've regressed from a world where we have depth of options where it comes to MUAs, to where we are now where the vast majority use webmail solutions exclusively. Webmail has definitely improved since the 90s and 00s, but unfortunately not every feature has come along for the ride, making that also tricky.

As far as the barriers to entry go, thats subjective. Subscribing to a subreddit requires creating a reddit account. Subscribing to most forums requires signing up with an email address, password, possibly username as well, along with other biographical details (optional in some cases), and validating your email is real. Subscribing to a mailing list requires signing up with an email address and validating your email is real.

Anything you're not used to using, is always going to feel more cumbersome. If "happy mailman day" doesn't mean anything to you, you probably haven't had much experience with mailing lists (or have, but much more recent).

There are a number of clients that are particularly good at respecting the specific approaches to threading used by mailing lists and that come with a plethora of powerful keyboard interactions to make browsing a whole bunch of emails trivial. But newer devs may be quite unfamiliar with those options and I don't think it's particularly easy information to learn... especially if your webmail has "just worked" for most other uses.

I guess I would say that mailing lists favor producers over consumers.

Often when I am looking at a mailing list it is for the same reason I am poking through a GitHub issue. I am looking for someone who had a similar problem and maybe someone else had a solution.

Thus I think I am largely a consumer.

As a consumer I dont often think, let me go to my email client. My email client is where I get bills and notifications and some personal correspondence. It is definitely not where I go when I am looking to consume.

I would disagree that it is as easy as just signing up with an email. I have to set up filters etc and shift to an entirely different client after I sign up the entering an email address is just the first step.

I feel that for people who are core developers email lists are probably great. They are essentially looking to communicate with only a few people and the topics are quite specific. Where they fail me is they make it harder to convert a consumer to a producer. For all the problems I have with OSS's seemingly centralization on Github I am far more likely to drop into some random Github issue than I am to join a mailing list.

Edit: I think you updated your comment while I replied (or maybe I just hit reply without seing the last part of your comment). I see now that you've mentioned GitHub issues, which is a kind of interface that I've seen get a better balance, but I'm not sure how it stands from a producor pov against a mailing list (decentralization is obviously lacking on them).