Re: Switching to Discourse

Barry Warsaw <[email protected]> Fri, 9 Dec 2022 09:20:09 -0800
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.python.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
It’s possible, but here’s the way I look at it.  I’m *already* engaged with dozens of communities, within Python but also others.  So every morning I’d wake up to many hundreds of emails, which is just incredibly stress inducing.  So it’s a tension between guarding my time better and FOMO.  Discourse helps me manage that much better because rather than *all* of those conversations ending up in a bunch of email folders, now they’re just sitting in forum channels.  This gives me two advantages: 1) I can pull from the conversations when it’s convenient for me, not when the stress of email hygiene guilts me into it, and 2) it’s so much easier to ignore the stuff I don’t care about, or even skim the stuff I mildly care about, while giving me more quality time to spend on the conversations I do care about.

As for python-committers, I turned off most email notifications from GH and use their notifications tab on the issues and PR I care about, and ignore the rest.  GH’s notifications page isn’t fantastic, but it’s manageable and seems like a net win for controlling how and when I consume those conversations.

My workflow centers around a browser tab group I call “Comms” and there it’s got my webmail, which I use in addition to my desktop mail client, and maybe 4 Discourse tabs for the various communities I follow, one of which is Python’s.  I usually just click on the “New” tab for each to see what’s happening, and then go through the conversations I’ve tagged or responded to.  I might drop in to those a couple of times a day when things are slow.  Then of course there’s Discord for various Python groups, and Python’s Slack.

The whole shift away from email leaves me calmer and better engaged.

-Barry

> On Dec 9, 2022, at 06:49, Stephen J. Turnbull <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Barry Warsaw writes:
>> I absolutely love not having to slog through hundreds of emails
>> before my first shots of caffeine, and I can now pull from
>> Discourse or GH when it’s convenient for me.  It’s also much easier
>> to disengage for a few days and catch up later.
> 
> I absolutely cannot imagine slogging through hundreds of posts in the
> Discourse interface.  Couldn't this be, as Baptiste suggests, a
> symptom of people disengaging and there just being less traffic?  Or
> is it somehow being channeled better so that you're only seeing what
> interests you now?
> 
> In particular I have to suspect that a boatload of those were
> python-committers mails that are now basically obsolete (can't say, I
> never have sought enough responsibility that I needed to subscribe to
> that firehose).  But that would help with python-dev/ideas too.
> 
> Steve
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