Mailing lists aren't great, and neither is nntp. But mailing lists (and nntp) work fine with proper clients and some discipline/netiquette.
Sadly I don't think there is a reasonable way to introduce new users at this point - I'm not aware of any great gui clients that do the right thing; and AFAIK neither Gmail or o365/exchange work in a reasonable way with open standards (allow checking for when others are free; accepting/changing appointments etc) - so users are herded towards the semi-proprietary clients. (and interop across silos doesn't really work in a sensible way).
There are things like the d-lang forums that mix a decent web front-end and nntp (and mailman makes an effort for web+smtp) - but I'm not aware of anything that really works great, with a low barrier of entry and reasonably lets users participate across more than a handful of threads.
Sadly I don't think there is a reasonable way to introduce new users at this point - I'm not aware of any great gui clients that do the right thing; and AFAIK neither Gmail or o365/exchange work in a reasonable way with open standards (allow checking for when others are free; accepting/changing appointments etc) - so users are herded towards the semi-proprietary clients. (and interop across silos doesn't really work in a sensible way).
There are things like the d-lang forums that mix a decent web front-end and nntp (and mailman makes an effort for web+smtp) - but I'm not aware of anything that really works great, with a low barrier of entry and reasonably lets users participate across more than a handful of threads.