Mailing lists are resistant to censorship
Ok, let's go beyond general principles about mailing lists and be more concrete in thinking and see if a truly censorship proof dev & distribute architecture is possible.Let's work backwards from this desired command line:  youtube-dl -U  

That command automatically downloads latest version.  (Important because Youtube, Vimeo, etc changes constantly and breaks old youtube-dl versions.)We have 2 main areas to implement:1) the code artifacts:  a source code repo (and binary releases for download) ; for Linux kernel, I think this is "www.kernel.org"[1]2) the workflow:  the issues / bug reports / pull requests ; for Linux kernel collaboration, a popular mailing list is "majordomo@vger.kernel.org"[2]If youtube-dl switches from github to mailing lists, how would the "-U" command work?  Would somebody need to setup a SMTP server (or at minimum, a SMTP email account) dedicated to youtube-dl?  Would youtube-dl then use SMTP protocol to scan the mailing list for which server has the latest code artifacts?Does making youtube-dl act as a pseudo email-client make it RIAA proof?  Are SMTP servers beyond the legal reach of RIAA?EDIT to reply: This article is about the developer workflow, not about what the end-user software should do.I understand that but I think it's productive to go beyond that and think out loud what a realistic implementation could be to help end users.  Besides, many end users are also the code contributors.[1] https://www.kernel.org/[2] http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-kernel