So last night I tried activating mailing list mode, and I'm not remotely satisfied with the experience so far. Where mailing lists are concerned, I'm only subscribed to python-dev. Not python-users, not -ideas, not -packaging (if that's still a thing). But Discourse's mailing list mode sends me messages for all of those things in such a volume that it drowns out any discussions on topics that would have shown up on python-dev (I think one PEP discussion message came in overnight, compared to 20+ posts on other tags). After the first two -users messages came in almost immediately, I tried telling discourse to mute the tags I don't care about, but it seems not to work at all. The page with the mailing list mode toggle warns that it overrides other email settings, so I think I just get everything regardless of other settings.

If my only option is to be subscribed to a firehose of stuff I don't care about, I'm going to disable mailing list mode and if python-dev dies, I'll pretty much quit following Python's development. Now, I'm not a very important Python developer, I'm not a core dev, and my contributions are a few bug reports and a few patches over many years. But if there's no way to lurk on a modest-volume mailing list and contribute only occasionally, you're not going to get nearly as many people paying attention. I'm sure I could set up a whole suite of filters on my own end (e.g. discard any email with a subject starting with "[py] [Users]"), but that's an absurd and unnecessary burden, and it will only get worse the more categories you add to discourse (and I think the ease of adding categories is supposed to be a feature). This plan is going to drive developers like me away.

For discourse mailing list mode to be a reasonable substitute for python-dev, it needs filtering on the sending end to work. Ideally there would be a way to subscribe only to the things I care about. Maybe that exists, but it's buried in menus I don't understand (or which mailing list mode overrides).

Rather than comparing the number of posters on discourse vs python-dev, have we compared stats for how many people receive the messages?