Discourse seems quite nice in one particular way: it is soaking up less of my attention than the mailing list was. However, I’m a bit surprised that it doesn’t seem to have much built in ability to do “meta-…” discussions. Yes, we can HAVE them, but that’s not marked inside the system.
Often a thread will get started and someone will come along and take it in a completely different direction. On Wikipedia this kind of “directorial” intervention would go into a talk page (and if it gets stuck there, it will go into some sort of arbitration, etc.)
It looks like there’s a built in way to do this but maybe people don’t know about it (I didn’t) so I’m going to press save to see if my hypothesis is correct…