There's just no reason to use a mailing list when forums, chats, pull requests and issue trackers exist. They're clunky and hard to use and terrible UX compared to the alternatives. Its much easier to filter on what you actually want to see with modern tools.
But most forums these days are shitty compared to what we had a decade or longer ago, when it comes to being accessible and searchable. If we were using classical forums everywhere, I might agree, but with the new JS-only crop of forums, I feel delighted, when a community has an active mailing list instead.
And chats don't really serve information archival or storage functions well. Especially not proprietary ones like Discord. Maybe some like Zulip, if there is some extension or so, to make content well searchable from a search engine. But that is still only a maybe.
PRs and issue trackers, yes, yes, but only if you got capable people moderating them, not people who think, that employing a github bot to auto close issues is a good idea, when questions remain unanswered. Also one cannot paste GPL licensed code on Github issues any longer with a good conscience, because of code laundering by MS. So that is also no good solution any longer.
> There's just no reason to use a mailing list when forums, chats, pull requests and issue trackers exist.
One thing that modern tools lack that classic tools had was an index view that allowed you to quickly navigate to the comment/message you wanted to read. They also lack an easy marker to show whether you have already read the message. Both of these features were in the email and new client I used in the mid to late '90s. These features are missing in forums, chats, pull requests, and issue trackers that I have to use today, so I end up having to navigate to pages to see whether they've been updated and I have to spend a lot of time scrolling to find the update within the page.
> They're clunky and hard to use and terrible UX compared to the alternatives.
Having to repeatedly check the same page and scroll a lot to even find what one is looking for is a lot more clunky and more difficult to use compared to the classic interfaces available a quarter century ago.
With the right email client, the efficiency of mailing lists for asynchronous longer-form discussions is unmatched (except possibly for Usenet – they are very similar). The crucial parts are auto-sorting into mailing list-specific folders, threaded display, newest-on-bottom, and keyboard navigation.
The only think that email lacks that nntp has is the ability to easily find messages from before you subscribed to the list (or were CC'd). With email, you could download a list archive and import it in your MUA, but with NNTP, you can just subscribe to a group and pull up messages as far back as you want (up till the oldest message on the server).
While all MUA sucks UI/UX for most web forums even worse - much higher response time, and a lot of mouse clicks for navigation (instead of familiar keyboard shortcuts). Some sites do support shortcuts but they differ from site to site while with MUA you need to learn them only once for all maillists.
I agree that requirement to subscribe to a maillist is an entry barrier which doesn't exists for web forums but once you're are subscribed it is faster to skim messages in a mailbox.
I wish NNTP was still alive and widely used - it is easier/faster to subscribe to a newsgroup than to a maillist and once you've subscribed you can see old messages in your client and reply to them (not only new messages like with a maillist).
I think people prefer mailing lists over nntp due to a number of reasons:
1. It's easier to set a mailing list up compared to creating a new newsgroup or setting up an on-premise NNTP server (is NNTP as a service even a thing?)
2. Most people have access to email clients (either web based or local applications) compared to NNTP clients.
Personally, I think it would be much better if people use NNTP instead of mailing lists, but doing so would require somoene to maintain the NNTP server and handle account creation for posting access.
