Mailing lists are OK for small groups of people and if you want to restrict the audience to just those people. However, if there is a lot of discussion on the list - say more than a couple of messages per day, then your mailbox can quickly fill up. A more efficient way of communicating with groups who are interested in a topic is to use the Usenet News Bulletin Board system.
A bulletin board is an electronic notice board with lots of separate categories. If you have software to read the bulletin board, then you can browse the different categories and post your own messages. In this way, anyone can read the message who is interested, and the messages are not stored on your own computer, but on an NNTP server machine.
There are over 3,500 different Usenet categories which are known as News Groups. They have a hierarchical naming convention - e.g. sci.bio.ecology is a discussion group on ecology, in the ``biological'' sub group of ``science''. alt.fan.pratchett is a fan club for Terry Pratchett's books (!). Some sad people spend all their time in darkened rooms entering into long and meaningful discussions with like minded people around the world on UseNet - beware! The most interesting and useful news groups for us are those under the bionet.* hierarchy. bionet.proteins, bionet.crystallography, bionet.software, bionet.molbiol.proteins, etc.