The actual topics of our mailing lists diaspora-discuss and diaspora-dev were never really defined and/or communicated. Lets change that. Additionally I would like to use this discussion to propose a new mailing list diaspora-announcement which is read-only for most people and only people who have commit rights can post to it. Lets also reuse this discussion for any proposals regarding mailing lists.
Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.
So my current thinking is that any kind of usage and cultural stuff should go to discuss and everything related to the actual development, including discussing new features, should go to dev.
That sounds eminently sensible, Jonne.
I do wish that we could get away from mailing lists, however, as I don’t find them good ways to work. I find it annoying to keep getting emails relating to things I’m not involved with, and also I don’t feel comfortable to take part in discussions as it would involve giving away my email address (and I really don’t want to set up yet another email address, just for Diaspora discussions…)
Loomio is working really we for discussions so far, and I’d like to see a message board set up. Hopefully someone can get in touch with Ryan Kohles (I’ve been unable to) and the diasporaforum.org site can be resurrected, because that was useful.
Until recently I thought Diaspora Discuss was dead 
I agree to Jonne’s reasoning - but I also think the diaspora-users list is not a bad idea. Just to forward any user help queries there (if they don’t like IRC or the other channels).
The volume of our lists might be low now but it might not be low in the future. I remember a time when these lists were swamped with emails 
Still, lets introduce it when the need occurs, lets not continue to do the mistake of making our communication channels opaque. Subscribing to yet another mailing list is an extra effort which would just divide the community further. Currently there’s no issue in having the this kind if stuff in the discuss list, so denying it there would just do harm, no good.
IMO Loomio is no alternative to a mailing list while it’s invite only.
Any objections to creating an announcements list as described in the description?
Well I kind of don’t see why announcements could not be sent to discuss and dev - in reality if we do send announcement we will have to include these lists anyway since we cannot rely on everybody subscribing to the announcements list - at least initially.
Maybe in the long run it makes sense. No objection anyway 
The thing it would be useful for is for people not being interested in anything else and who never heard of feedreaders and/or our blog.