Thanks for commenting.

I've installed and administered both phpBB and Discourse in the past.

Both get a forum's job done. Both have big upsides and big downsides.

> I have been a Discourse user for some professional and OSS projects.
>
> Discourse may not be suitable for a couple of reasons:
>
> 1. Users who want to interact via email can continue to do so - but that
> this is not the default.

Agreed. We should use something where email is first-class.

> - I do worry that mailing lists are dinosaurs, but you can argue the
> same about forums, with a lot of activity moving to slack, and now
> discord in recent years. While I like a lack and discord - they do have
> disadvantages in being walled gardens.

Indeed. Many argue that Scheme and Lisp are dinosaurs.

Personally I have no idea how people can get any thinking done using an
unstructured chat, but that seems to be the norm now. And a perpetual
upgrade treadmill of ever new proprietary chat platforms is considered
acceptable.

Knuth's comments on writing TAOCP in assembly language come to mind.
When suggested to use a high-level language, he asked which one. If he
followed trends, or what people consider "easy to use", he'd have to
rewrite the books every decade.

Lisp is a similar long-term project, so perhaps mailing lists are
appropriate and their eventual replacement has to come from the Lisp
community itself.

> 2. categories are the closest thing to mailing lists, but categories are
> not isolated in the same ways as mailing lists - by default you don’t
> subscribe individually
>
> - I think this is a positive - I believe the fragmentation of scheme
> communities has always been a problem and positioning implementations as
> competitors is unprofessional and unproductive

It has both upsides and downsides. Most schemers don't have the time and
interest to keep up with all mailing lists. I expect this wolud be
equally true on a forum.

I agree about fragmentation, but like all social fragmentation it has
deeper reasons and cannot be solved simply by putting everyone in the
same space.

> https://github.com/discourse/discourse
>
> Some programming language community examples:
> https://discourse.julialang.org <https://discourse.julialang.org>
> https://discourse.haskell.org <https://discourse.haskell.org>
> https://elixirforum.com <https://elixirforum.com>
> https://clojureverse.org <https://clojureverse.org>
> https://users.rust-lang.org <https://users.rust-lang.org>
> https://discourse.elm-lang.org/ <https://discourse.elm-lang.org/>
> https://discuss.ocaml.org <https://discuss.ocaml.org>
> https://discuss.python.org <https://discuss.python.org>
> https://swi-prolog.discourse.group <https://swi-prolog.discourse.group>
> https://racket.discourse.group/ <https://racket.discourse.group/>
> https://discourse.processing.org <https://discourse.processing.org>
> https://fortran-lang.discourse.group <https://fortran-lang.discourse.group>
>
> Some host themselves and some projects use the free hosting for open
> source projects: https://free.discourse.group

Thanks. That's a very impressive list. At least Discourse is FOSS.

> I believe PHPbb may be worth investigating but I’ve only used it a
> little in the RaspberryPi community.

Arthur wrote:

>     I found a few during some research a few years ago, but the only one
>     that seems to be active any more is Sympa.

I looked at it; it seems to be a huge Perl contraption. I anticipate
similar pains as with Mailman. Perhaps that will be our lot.

>     Also see Awesome-Selfhosted
>     <https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted.>.

Thanks. It lists the usual suspects and some newsletter tools.