Is it a newsgroup or a list?

[random832 at fastmail.us]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2015, at 05:06, Luca Menegotto wrote:
> Il 07/06/2015 10:22, Cecil Westerhof ha scritto:
>  > That only times the function. I explicitly mentioned I want both the
>  > needed time AND the output.
>  >
>  > Sadly the quality of the answers on this list is going down....
> 
> First of all, thank God it's a newsgroup, not a list.
...
> -- 
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

I've always thought of this as a list that is mirrored to a newsgroup,
not a newsgroup that is mirrored to a list. What is the true nature of
python-list (and others such as python-ideas)? What is it primarily,
what was it first, etc?