this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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Email systems and mailing lists are antiquated. Dumb behaviours make management of the system even harder.
As someone who has actually contributed to the linux kernel I think the kernel maintainers are doing a great job. Mailing lists work just fine.
Nobody said kernel maintainers aren't doing a great job
Mailing lists work. Working fine would not be having these articles
I'm saying other hypothetical systems would work better
Well they worked fine until AI flooded the system. Any hypothetical system would still have that much traffic and be very hard to manage processing all that information on a human level.
I agree with you. It makes interacting with Linux kernel development tedious and I think they like it that way.
It falls apart pretty quick when they reach a certain size which is what ai posts increase the chance of.
Still it has the advantages of being decentralized which keeps it off things like GitHub issues which is probably for the better.
You're putting this like llm spam is somehow a managed problem in github issues, where it's very much the same overwhelmed system with no good solution.
I'm not saying that at all.
Meh, as good as any other tool for a running private thread.
It's not though, hence this issue. Moderation, organisation and management tools are lacking because it's email
There are many such tools for email groups, and for the included audience, whipping up exactly what was needed for the job would be a pretty trivial task.
What do you suggest?
I think it's time the Linux maintainers put their heads together and come up with a decentralised tool for managing these issues much in the same way git was created for managing the source code of Linux
Git was created because one of those developers actually had a problem. The fact that they haven't tried to replace the mailing list yet suggests they don't actually have a problem with it.
Linus always praises email. He does no social media and most of his internet usage is just email is what I gather from his conversations and interviews.
There are a few thousand other developers, any one of them could start working on a replacement if it bothered them enough. Granted, a lot of them will be grey beards who are happy with mailing lists, but still, the overall friction hasn't pushed them far enough over the edge to replace it.
I guess the articles are about a big nothing
The problem highlighted by this article is the flood of slop. The mailing list is almost irrelevant, because regardless of whatever alternative you use, the flood of slop will still keep overwhelming it.
Emails don't allow merging threads very easily. The issue is lots of duplicates. Other tools would increase the capability to handle the popularity