I loved and love mailing lists, except for their capacity for ensuring everyone's email addresses are out there in the open for everyone else, including the scammers and spammers. I still use them (very few! and almost none of them are "tech ones"). I have a dedicated email address for them, which is disposable but doesn't look the part. I do wish, though, that many more groups would adopt mailing lists.

I had started a small cinema/lit club/group and got some good traction as well. But everyone wanted to bring in the latest group chat toys, online meet toys. I had proposed (the async) mailing list (private; I had hoped I'd find one), and it was shot down immediately, IIRC, by everyone else.