Re: [libreplanet-discuss] resources about mailing lists vs. forums (e.g. Discourse)

[J.B. Nicholson]

Michael Downey wrote:
> Blaming the Discourse software project ("discourse.org") for the
> capacity Mozilla did or didn't build out for their forum would be like
> blaming Automattic (builders of WordPress) for my project's site outage
> during LibrePlanet that year. It's neither accurate nor fair.

Are you saying that Mozilla decides how the server resources at 
discourse.org are set up?

From what I could tell by looking at some pages on discourse.org (such as 
https://www.discourse.org/copyright) Mozilla is not mentioned as a project 
manager. I'm well aware that Discourse is software and discourse.org is an 
instance of said software. But as far as I could tell Mozilla chose to have 
their forum hosted by discourse.org. Hence Mozilla did not decide to have 
too few server resources set up, the people who run discourse.org did.

> BTW, like mailing lists, Discourse users can subscribe in mailing list
> mode and receive an email for every post on the system, creating their
> own offline cache of information. I've got an individual email in my
> Inbox, auto-moved to a special folder, for each reply to the topic in
> the forum you link to above.

But there's no need to settle for either because both mailing lists and 
online web forums are all single points of censorship and technical 
failure. Newsgroups hosted across many cooperating NNTP servers is a 
well-known, tested, and more resilient structure both to avoid censorship 
and weak infrastructural choices. It could be that power over other 
people's posts is seen as an attractive point rather than something to 
avoid (consider that Mozilla appears to be pro-censorship in their 
community posting guidelines).