> If you force them to use it anyway, very few people will use it.

And that's perfectly fine. Not all things are for all people, and nor should they even try to be.

Noob questions:

PRs are public and email patches are receiver's inbox only, right?

When I'm assessing the merit of any given project, I'd want see if there's a backlog of PRs, right?

Do projects using email-patch workflows set up listservs for receiving patches?

> PRs are public and email patches are receiver's inbox only, right?

Not necessarily. For a 'lone wolf' project that might be the case, but some projects have public mailing-list archives, e.g. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lightning/

I think it would be necessary to do some manual copy+pasting, or else use custom scripts/tooling, to turn such mailing-list archive pages into patch files (for git apply) or mbox files (for git am).

See, I don't think it has much to do with not being on "the web" and everything to do with federated services actually being a terrible fit for most users most of the time, and not worth the headaches (e.g. spam, netsplits, missing posts...)