[Agda] On IRC, Slack, Gitter, Discord, and Zulip (re: Hanging out with the Lean crowd)

[David Thrane Christiansen]

> A wild thought that might seem impossible to some, but is much in line
>> with the proposal: Get rid of the mailing list as well in the long run.
>> I'd consider mailing lists to be quite an arcane, unscalable, closed,
>> poorly searchable medium. Of course, a technologically superior
>> alternative such as Discourse or Zulip would have to be installed and
>> stabilised first, and ongoing discussions (and possibly the mailing list
>> history) moved there.
>>
>
> I agree that email is an outdated technology, however it is too entrenched
> to just get rid of it (unlike, say, the current Slack or Discord servers).
> If we have a clear alternative that works better, then conversations will
> naturally move over to there.
>

I'm mostly a lurker here, so my opinion is perhaps worth a bit less. But I
do think that email has a nice property that chat systems don't: the
affordances of the medium cause it to tend towards longer-form, more
thoughtful replies.

And mailing list archives tend to be nicely indexed - I've found useful
things from old Agda posts in my normal search results on various topics
even when I wasn't looking specifically in the Agda archives, but this has
never happened with a Zulip or Discord server. It would be a shame for
every search to need to be redone in five different closed chat systems
that don't even have stable archive formats.

David
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