Let’s stipulate that PostgreSQL has grown significantly in popularity over the last 20 years. I don’t know by how much, but certainly at least one order of magnitude, probably two or more.

It used to be the case that if you were a PostgreSQL user and wanted to interact with other PostgreSQL users and perhaps developers (which was a more fluent distinction back then), you’d hang out on mailing lists such as pgsql-general and maybe lurk a bit and answer questions and ask your own. There are a few such mailing lists, such as pgsql-general, pgsql-sql, pgsql-admin, but back then, that was basically it, that was the pretty much the whole world of PostgreSQL users hanging out and sharing knowledge. There was no other place.

One advantage of having this concentrated in one or a few related places is that it was easy to pick the place to hang out in. You’d be sure that if there was anywhere to get an answer or to learn something, this was the one. Also, for the developers, this was an easy and useful way to monitor user feedback and to engage with users, because you could just read along on a few mailing lists to get the entirety of user discussions about the product.

But I don’t think it works like that anymore.

Traffic on user mailing lists is down. In November 2004, there were 1507 messages on pgsql-general. In November 2024, there were only 445. (By contrast, traffic on pgsql-hackers was up 2279 versus 1300.) This is just one example; you can pick any combination of time intervals of the above-mentioned mailing lists to get similar results. Make a chart out of it to make it more depressing.

Where are all the users now?

Certainly, users still want to ask questions and other users still want to hang out with users and share knowledge.

Of course, we know the answer: They are on Stack Overflow, Reddit, Slack, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon, and so on and so on. I don’t even know the whole list. Is there a whole list? There are also non-text media that didn’t really exist in that way in say 2004: YouTube, podcasts, or in-person conferences. There are many options now.

Do these places give you the same community experience as before? Do they each have enough critical mass that each one is viable on their own and doesn’t force users to subscribe to a bunch of them?

Or here’s a question: Are there enough options where you can participate with some level of privacy or anonymity?

I am now firmly a PostgreSQL developer, no longer really a PostgreSQL user. From the perspective of a developer, I wonder: Do these new discussion places allow interaction with developers? Do they allow interested users to become interested in becoming a developer themselves? As a developer, where should I look to monitor user vibe and feedback?

On pgsql-hackers, we sometimes say things like, nobody has ever requested that, or, we have only seen three such cases in ten years. And we have the records to prove it. But if the mailing lists represent only a fraction of users overall and a fraction of users who want to interact in public, what kind of data is that?

And also, if another system became or were the dominant discussion platform, would it allow us to keep publicly available archives, or is it at the whim of some company that might change business plans in five years and take everything away?

Of course, this development is not special to PostgreSQL. Many open-source projects that came up in the mailing-list era are surely facing similar situations.

What can we do? I don’t mind that there is diversity in the way of interacting with other users and enthusiasts. Some competition is good. But I think the project should provide and own at least one of the options that people actually want to use.