I guess you found inria.fr and not infria.fr :-). If it's the case, the first thing you should notice when visiting it is the message:
"This site is updated infrequently. For up-to-date information, please visit the new OCaml website at ocaml.org."
and on ocaml.org, you'll find a "modern website" with a "more conventional" extension. One click later (on the Community
item of the upper menu), you'll get the information you need about mailing lists.
I would just like to remark that what you point out is more along an "image"
dimension, than a "substance" one.
The world is full of exciting "modern" programming languages that change syntax
and semantics every couple of months, or that force you to write zillions of
"modern" unit tests just to make sure you did not mix integers with strings,
while in the ML (and OCaml world) we just keep writing safe and elegant code
since the 1980's.
If you scratch a bit the surface, it's easy to see that a lof of the "new"
exciting technology around is actually "has been", while the "old" technology
underlying OCaml is actually "revolutionary".
It would be really nice for the mailing list to use the new ocaml.org
domain, which should be the outward face of OCaml.
Additionally, I think an official gitter.im page should be considered.
Many people are afraid to express their every thought and question on
the mailing list for fear of backlash or that they will be thought to
be spamming (a very realistic assessment, I may add). Users are much
more likely to communicate in a realtime chat environment like gitter.
IRC is simply incompatible with today's world -- many people cannot
access IRC from work, the logs aren't easily available etc as stated
by Duane. As an additional idea, the neovim project was able to create
a bridge between its IRC channel and its gitter.im page
(https://gitter.im/neovim/neovim).
Of course, the deeper tooling issues are with things like the build
system. It's remarkable how easy it is in a language like Rust to
build a project and pull down its dependencies. Of course Rust is a
newcomer, which allowed it to avoid all the legacy issues we're
suffering from. It's extremely unfortunate that we ended up with so
many different build systems, not to mention multiple standard
libraries.