Please please.
I would like to say, and you should already know, that when there is a change, when something start to work differently from the past, many people pops in saying: “it was better as it was before”. That’s fine, and that’s expected.
Said that, Fedora is not a business company. You can say there is RH behind the scenes, and blah blah and so on. Fedora is a community driven project; many people are volunteers and participate in their spare time. Someone is more involved, someone is less. Like in any FOSS project. What I think is that no one should feel obliged to provide help. And no one should pretend that. Too many times people like to be end users interacting with a supplier.
But we are a community, we collaborate, people need help and people is happy to give assistance. But what I mean is: this is not a work. If someone is happy to help people, he is not obliged to do so: he does it because he is rewarded by satisfaction.
Talking about fragmentation of communication and help platforms: you know, many people don’t like forums or any web platform (for instance I’ve never been an Askbot fan), many people prefer the plain old mailing lists (email), and nowadays many people like to use instant messaging (like Telegram) to get help. Everyone chose and look for help wherever he feels better.
At the same time, if there is a lack of people or resources that maintain or take care of a platform, it is better to shut down, and focus forces to something else. I think that who follows and maintain a project has the right to chose which is better to accomplish their goal, also the right to chose to change a platform, while doing their best for the users. Doing our best sometimes is not the best. Many people will disagree, many people will not be happy.
For instance I think that many issues on Askbot are outdated. People could help in identifying the questions with the solutions that are still valid regardless of the Fedora release, the common issues, the common questions, and add them to the list of commonly asked questions or also contribute to the Fedora Docs Project.
In the end, as stated somewhere else, the goal of this new platform is not a simple questions&answers platform. The choice of Discourse was also driven by the wish to involve people in the community. To teach and to learn something about how the community works. As said before, no one likes to work in an helpdesk department. We share experiences, points of view. People can learn how to submit a bug, instead of waiting that someone else does that in their behalf. We can learn new commands and new tools while troubleshooting our issues.