Discourse and emails have the same issue for me that I can't track who said what to whom; for example
https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-632-deprecate-distutils-module/5134/4 I spent way too much time following who replied to Matti and then who reacted back etc. (discourse has this weird habit showing
the reply
both in reply window and in the flow later in the page but maybe that's on me) but moving away from email seems the right thing for me.
Especially when a discussion doesn't converge to a point it is just a useless pile of text that promotes misunderstanding as can be seen from many discussion in many places (linux kernel being the notorious) and starts to have those >>>>>>>>>>> trains. I don't mind the next tech though I share the same concern for Slack as mentioned.
I still think that github discussions would help a lot in not-so-strategic decisions as I'm seeing it used within the GitHub beta repos.
Obvious disclosure, this is my personal view on it for what its worth. I get that there is still a huge dependence on email on different sectors and academia apparently.