> To them, email seems like an archaic platform where you can’t embed images, it’s not completely synchronous, and… I honestly couldn’t think of a third thing…<p>> I get it. These platforms are perhaps more inviting because of a friendly UI, inline image, GIF, and emoji support, and it all runs in the browser which is where everything else is seemingly done nowadays.<p>No, you don't get it. I don't care about embedding images and emoji. I can't speak for everyone, but the reasons I prefer something like discourse to email for discussing open source projects are:<p>- mail list archives generally have poor ui that is difficult to search or follow a conversation.<p>- subscription is all or nothing. You can't subscribe to a specific topic. Sure you could set up email filters, but that isn't exactly easy.<p>- link
ing to a parallel conversation isn't really possible. Maybe you could link to the archive, but from what I've seen that isn't really done.