let's not propose Discourse-related policies (at least not yet), please.

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Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Whether it will become a recommendation to use Discourse or not, I still think it would be valuable to have some kind of "policy" for mailing lists. Having them around is not "free" (since mailman / hyperkitty require a lot of ongoing maintenance) - closing / archiving inactive lists could potentially help with that.

Without taking a stance—for the purposes of this ticket—on whether or how email lists should be migrated to Discourse, I have some concerns about the request:

• It feels like this is asking for a complete “master plan” for how email and Discourse should work. I think it’s important to talk about the overall strategy early and often, but I think the project would be better off making any policy changes targeted and incremental so that we can learn and adapt as we go.
• Discussion of the proposed Discourse migration is still extremely active, and creating significant policy around it feels premature.

As @decathorpe said, a policy for inactive or nearly-inactive lists could make sense, but I would want to see input from direct stakeholders: those who maintain hyperkitty and those who participate in low-activity mailing lists.

15 posts per month

A list with 15 posts/month is active. But I think we could shut down lists which are (fully) inactive.
The archives, sorted by active, seem to show only inactive lists starting at page 9:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/?sort=active&page=9. "omping" is the first. The hyperkitty interface doesn't have any way to show when the last mail to the list happened, but it seems at least a few years. I assume something similar is true for lists on pages 9–67. Maybe we could archive those without any loss.

Then there's a bunch of lists used that contain just a periodic announcement, like https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/budget-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/. I guess those could go too.

I'm not sure this is a fesco decision really... I mean, a number of mailing lists are used for technical side of things, but there's also a bunch of mindshare and other lists.

We have had a low priority infra task to look at closing old/unused/low volume lists, but it's not been urgent enough for anyone to do.
If someone would like to step up to leed such an effort, it would be most welcome. :)

Finally, this ticket is a great example of why our current setup isn't great. This ticket was filed from discussion on the list. I suspect 99% of people didn't follow that link or watch this issue, and here we are discussing more what should be done, which is something that we should try and include the entire community in, not just people in a fesco ticket. :)

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https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2023-05-02/fesco.2023-05-02-17.00.log.html

17:34:08 <mhayden> #action mhayden to update #2982 with some updates from this meeting
17:34:16 <zbyszek[m]> For housekeeping, I think we should close the ticket as "not desired, at least for now". That seems be the outcome of the discussion here.
17:34:28 <mhayden> agreed
17:34:30 <Eighth_Doctor> +1
17:34:36 <music[m]> +1
17:34:38 <nirik> 1
17:34:42 <nirik> +
17:34:56 <bkm> Ok
17:34:56 <sgallagh> +1
17:34:59 <nirik> nice... markdown + for the win. ;) +1
17:35:04 <decathorpe> +1

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that counts as "let's close this".

Thanks @zbyszek. I missed this update when work got busy. 🙃

Related ticket has been created for Fedora Council https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/452