Have you dealt with email in the past 10 years? If there is one thing I do not need more of it’s email.

I also want nothing in the critical part for development to be email, so I can completely ignore the whole email client.

Github lets me instantly jump in and contribute to a project with an issue report without having to sign up to a mailing list. I hate mailing lists with a passion because they spam my inbox with rubbish.

Yes I know you can automate filtering them in to folders but that isn't simple to do when you self host email and use it across multiple computers because most filtering is done client side.

I also have one mailing list that seems to have messed up and I'm stuck on the list despite trying to unsubscribe a few times.

You don't have to sign up for most mailing lists to send an email to them. The default permissions for new lists on SourceHut allow postings from non-subscribers. It's very common to fire off a patch without subscribing.

Email would let me participate without having to sign up with github.

Anyway, email has threading, at least. At the very minimum github needs to step up and acknowledge how terrible issues are for communicating.