I'm a newcomer to the project and the list, still working on getting some time to actually get my endpoint up and running -- so I don't have a lot of history on this.
I think discourse is a great piece of software if you're looking to host a web discussion forum, but that's not always the best way to manage communication, and the feedback so far seems like people prefer email for this particular group. From what I've seen, that makes sense to me.
> A few have said they don't want anything that is "cloud based".
Anything you get from the internet is "cloud based" one way or
another.
I think the sentiment that people are expressing isn't about where the infrastructure lives, but more about using the walled gardens that are SaaS products. There are legitimate concerns here. A paid service can change the rules at any time. They can, and often do, treat you like a product, selling information about you to other organizations for their benefit, and not really for yours. They can decide to just close their doors, or terminate the product and give you nothing. Not wanting to be subject to this is not unreasonable.
I am in multiple
groups.io lists. I don't love it, but it's not the worst thing ever -- aside from the above concerns that come with any hosted solution of that sort.
If I do get any veto influence I would use it on any suggestion of using discord. I abhor discord for all of the above reasons, plus their abominable terms of service which, among other things, bar you from using any other client but theirs. (It's technically feasible, but if they discover it they ban you.) No bridges, no unified clients, nothing. They are the worst and I hate that they've gotten so much traction despite being such a garbage organization.