Re: [bitcoin-dev] Future of the bitcoin-dev mailing list

[Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au>]

On Tue, Nov 07, 2023 at 09:37:22AM -0600, Bryan Bishop via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Web forums are an interesting option, but often don't have good email user
> integration.

> What about bitcointalk.org or delvingbitcoin.org?

delvingbitcoin.org is something I setup; it's a self-hosted discourse
instance. (You don't have to self-host discourse, but not doing so limits
the number of admins/moderators, the plugins you can use, and the APIs you
can access)

For what it's worth, I think (discourse) forums have significant
advantages over email for technical discussion:

 * much better markup: you can write LaTeX for doing maths, you
   can have graphviz or mermaid diagrams generated directly from text,
   you can do formatting without having to worry about HTML email.
   because that's done direct from markup, you can also quote such
   things in replies, or easily create a modified equation/diagram
   if desired, things that are much harder if equations/diagrams are
   image/pdf attachments.

 * consistent threading/quoting: you don't have to rely on email clients
   to get threading/quoting correct in order to link replies with the
   original message

 * having topics/replies, rather than everything being an individual
   email, tends to make it easier to avoid being distracted by followups
   to a topic you're not interested in.

 * you can do reactions (heart / thumbs up / etc) instead of "me too"
   posts, minimising the impact of low-content responses on readers,
   without doing away with those responses entirely.

 * after the fact moderation: with mailing lists, moderation can only
   be a choice between "send this post to every subscriber" or not,
   and the choice obviously has to be made before anyone sees the posts;
   forums allow off-topic/unconstructive posts to be removed or edited.

Compared to mailing-lists-as-a-service, a self-hosted forum has a few
other possible benefits:

 * it's easier to setup areas for additional topics, without worrying
   you're going to be forced into an arbitrarily higher pricing tier

 * you can setup spaces for private working groups. (and those groups can
   make their internal discussions public after the fact, if desired)

 * you can use plugin interfaces/APIs to link up with external resources

There are a few disadvantages too:

 * discourse isn't lightweight -- you need a whole bunch of infrastructure
   to go from the markdown posts to the actual rendered posts/comments;
   so backups of just the markdown text isn't really "complete"

 * discourse is quite actively developed -- so it could be possible
   that posts that use particular features/plugins (eg to generate
   diagrams) will go stale eventually as the software changes, and stop
   being rendered correctly

 * discourse gathers a moderate amount of non-public/potentially private
   data (eg email addresses, passwords, IP addresses, login times) that
   may make backups and admin access sensitive (which is why there's a
   git archive generated by a bot for delvingbitcoin, rather than raw
   database dumps)

There are quite a few open source projects using discourse instances, eg:

  Python: https://discuss.python.org/
  Ruby on Rails: https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/
  LLVM: https://discourse.llvm.org/
  Jupyter: https://discourse.jupyter.org/
  Fedora: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/
  Ubuntu: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/
  Haskell: https://discourse.haskell.org/

There's also various crypto projects using it:

  Eth research: https://ethresear.ch/
  Chia: https://developers.chia.net/

There's a couple of LWN articles on Python's adoption of discourse
that I found interesting, fwiw:

  https://lwn.net/Articles/901744/  [2022-07-20]
  https://lwn.net/Articles/674271/  [2016-02-03]

I don't think this needs to be an "either-or" question -- better to
have technical discussions about bitcoin in many places and in many
formats, rather than just one -- but I thought I'd take the opportunity
to write out why I thought discourse was worth spending some time on in
this context.

Cheers,
aj