I’ve been noticing that forums based on Discourse are increasingly difficult for those of us using older hardware. Right now this is the last one I can still log in to, the rest have become read-only for me. And this one now has the banner https://meta.discourse.org/t/358131 announcing that it will soon be incompatible with my browser. Not just THIS browser, but with ANY that can be installed on this machine, or any of the other old machines that I own.
If you can connect on a supported browser once, you can already activate the “mailing list mode” (need to go to your user profile, settings, email, at the bottom there is the mailing list mode option).
I only tried it on another discourse forum, but it had two major limitations:
no way to initiate a new discussion (can only reply to already initiated ones)
no email upon update of a previous message
For the new discussion initiation, what was missing was an email address to post by category, but I think this feature exists. I have not tried on Freedombox forum, I don’t know whether this is available or not.
I may end up enabling that “mailing list mode” option. But it does seem to be limited to replies and does not allow starting threads, So if someone is trying to report a problem or ask for help, they could not do it this way, even assuming they had previously turned on that option. And of course most people won’t know that option exists, unless they read this particular thread. (I didn’t know until you said it here.)