I'll keep this brief: we have Discourse! You can find it at discourse.vpsfree.cz.
Back in 2009, we started with a forum intended as a place to ask for help and discuss things in general, but hardly anyone used it. There may have been three posts that were not mine. We then moved to mailing lists, which have the advantage that many more people notice an incoming email. That worked, but around the time we passed 1000 members, that very advantage started working against us. All too often, we wonder whether our little question is worth spamming so many people.
Personally, I am always delighted when something gets solved on community-list. I would like to see more of that, much more. I do not think we have run out of things to solve or talk about. The mailing list format has probably just had its day for us.
Discourse looks as though it could give us the best of both worlds: you can use it by email, but it is organized more like a forum.
If we manage to get more activity going on Discourse, we could also consider moving from IRC to Discourse Chat. There are now only around 50 people in the IRC room, down from a peak of about 100, in line with IRC's declining relevance.
Incidentally, there is now a bot called vpsfbr0 in #vpsfree. It is an instance of matterbridge, which should eventually let us bridge all the major instant messaging systems, at least in a basic way. For now, it is configured as a bridge to Matrix.
You can log in to vpsFree Discourse using your vpsAdmin credentials (for members) or create a regular account (for non-members). To give people a little extra reason to come and have a look, we thought we could use the occasion to offer all the hardware that has been switched off for a year and that we definitely will not need.
What happens to the mailing lists:
We will keep news-list running as it does now for a while, but after some time (six months to a year), it will move to a combination of Discourse (where people can discuss things afterwards) and the blog (as a public noticeboard).
outage-list: vpsAdmin has long been able to report outages directly to affected members, and the full history is available without logging in, so we can stop sending to this list straight away
community-list: at the end of the year, we will disable new posts and set up an automatic reply saying that discussion has moved to Discourse
And with that, we will say goodbye to mailing lists :).
Thank you to everyone who has been active on them. Please take this as an invitation to the new platform. Let us try to make it a fresh opportunity to share experiences, hopefully with less friction than on the mailing lists.