[HN Gopher] Google Groups has been left to die
___________________________________________________________________
Google Groups has been left to die
Author : ahelwer
Score : 400 points
Date : 2023-03-08 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ahelwer.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (ahelwer.ca)
| bg24 wrote:
| Free systems offered by Corporations survive as long as there is
| incentive (justified ROI). Headcount movement decisions are done
| based on numbers. That said, 10+ years is a GOOD life expectancy
| of a software product used at scale.
| fuddle wrote:
| Nice to see the author created discussion threads on lobste.rs,
| Hacker News and r/programming
| dsr_ wrote:
| https://forum.dlang.org/ is a web forum.
|
| Which is also on Usenet/NNTP.
|
| Which is also a mailing list archive.
|
| And also an IRC bot.
|
| AGPL. https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
| jordigh wrote:
| It's also blazingly fast. An awesome D app.
| [deleted]
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| Google acts like it's suffering from ADHD.
| politician wrote:
| I disagree, Google Groups and Usenet are immortal now that they
| have been included into LLM training corpuses.
| blahblah1234567 wrote:
| anyone who depends on google products is living under a rock
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between
| products that google started and killed and products that
| google bought and killed.
|
| The former can be a sign of healthy experimentation. The latter
| is just frustrating, particularly when Google paid a _lot_ for
| the product in question. Groups at least partly came out of the
| Dejanews acquisition and seeing something purchased by a
| company that will be a poor steward is frustrating.
| amf12 wrote:
| > My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between
| products that google started and killed and products that
| google bought and killed.
|
| Or products that were merged in other products [1], or which
| had newer versions [2].
|
| [1] Google Bookmarks, Password Checkup Extension -> Chrome,
| etc. [2]: Nest Hub, Nexus Phones, OnHub.
| scrollaway wrote:
| And anyone who comments on Google-related topics with the link
| to killedbygoogle is beating a dead horse...
|
| So tired of that argument.
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| Actually, I didn't know about the site, so I'm glad that the
| comment was posted. It seems like a great resource for
| project idea prompts that can be taken,
| modified/customized/generalized/specialized into something
| new!
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| It's also mentioned and linked to in the second sentence of
| the article.
| blahblah1234567 wrote:
| Ironically, you're making this claim on a thread about yet
| another google product dying from neglect
|
| rofl :)
| zabzonk wrote:
| i used it to do tech support for my CSVFix foss software. it was
| free and worked ok - what more do you want?
|
| at least it lasted much longer than google code, which is where i
| used to host my foss projects. when that closed, i switched to
| bit bucket (mercurial user here) and then they dropped mercurial
| support. i sure can pick them!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| In about 2006 at Google, I met a guy who was working on Groups.
| He was the _only one_ , and he was remote, even before that was a
| Thing.
|
| It's always been the thing no one wants to work on there. I'm
| pretty sure they could make it a permanent 20% project, if those
| ar still happening. I wouldn't be surprised if it already does
| get most of its love that way.
| blitzar wrote:
| That person might still be there and they might still be the
| only one on the product.
| jmclnx wrote:
| As someone who uses a "real" usenet site and reader, cannot wait
| until google groups is gone. One of the many issues is
| "comp.lang.c++" items from google is being sent to "comp.lang.c"
| because a change google made cannot handle the "++".
|
| The sad thing is we may loose the history that came from
| dejanews, I was one of the many people who were very upset when
| dejanews was bought by google. No surprise it morphed into the
| abortion that is google news.
|
| Good riddance google groups, do not let the door hit you on the
| way out.
| lucumo wrote:
| > The sad thing is we may loose the history that came from
| dejanews,
|
| I'm actually quite happy with that. I was on Usenet as an
| imprudent teenager. I'm sure there's stuff I posted that I
| don't want associated with me now.
|
| Also, possibly some stuff that could associate this nickname
| with my real name, and since there's also stuff on HN I don't
| want associated with me.
| mpakes wrote:
| You're not alone in this. It might be a good idea to delete
| or edit this post; As currently written, it provides
| instructions and encouragement to make these connections. :)
| rsync wrote:
| "The sad thing is we may loose the history that came from
| dejanews ..."
|
| What is the status of usenet archives and backups, circa 2023 ?
|
| I've mentioned this before and will mention it again now:
|
| I am _very enthusiastic_ about preserving usenet /fidonet
| archives and will contribute cash money as well as free
| rsync.net storage to any serious endeavors in that realm.
| magicalist wrote:
| There's [1]
|
| A couple of years ago there was a bunch of excitement
| around[2] (discussion[3]), but looks like it's been taken off
| the internet archive due to legal challenges trying to get
| some material removed from it. Lots of copies out there if
| you search for UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive, though.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770617
| ksherlock wrote:
| archive.org has some historical usenet dumps. There's no viewer
| so you need to download them as individual files (generally 1
| file per group).
| livrem wrote:
| The groups I downloaded from archive.org are all in standard
| mbox-format and can be searched using mboxgrep. That has been
| good enough for me when I have wanted to search for
| something. In the past I often went to google groups, but I
| never manage to find anything there now it seems.
| bpye wrote:
| If Google Groups is actually going to die would it not be worth
| scraping the history for at least some groups?
| chx wrote:
| It would be _so much_ nicer if someone from Google -- we know
| they are reading this forum could release the archive to
| Archive.org. Google doesn 't do much with it, they removed
| Advanced Search so... why not?
| zamnos wrote:
| It's due to legal challenges, unfortunately, and as Manu
| Cornet's org chart depicts[1], this means that there just
| isn't the resources at Google to deal with it, nor is there
| the insurgent counter-culture to release it via torrent on
| 4chan.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-
| charts-2011-6
| nayroclade wrote:
| While I also lament what Google Groups has become, let's not
| rewrite history. By 2001, Dejanews had rebranded as a shopping
| comparison site, ran out of money, and was on the verge of
| shutting down. I don't remember many people being upset about
| Google stepping in to save the archive. And, in the early days,
| the signs were positive. Google actually cared about it at that
| point, and still had a good reputation. They expanded the
| archive with contributions from other sources and worked to
| improve the search and posting interfaces. Yes, eventually they
| lost interest and it degraded into the current abomination, but
| that happened later.
| astrostl wrote:
| > I don't remember many people being upset about Google
| stepping in
|
| I don't remember any former/active usenet user _not_ being
| upset! Specifically because Deja had a full archive and
| robust search, and it was expected that the service would be
| Googlified into oblivion. Which happened, and even faster
| than the biggest doomsayers predicted.
| __d wrote:
| My recollection is that Google of that time still believed
| its own "Dont' be Evil" mantra, and so did its users.
|
| DejaNews was going down, and Google with their buckets of
| money and great technology stepped in to save it. The
| initial expectation was that it'd just keep going, maybe
| with better integration of Usenet content with Google's
| search (which was a desirable thing, because so much
| history and detail was locked up in Usenet archives).
| scrollaway wrote:
| In 2001? "Googlified"??? Do you even realize this was
| Google's _first acquisition_?
|
| Either you're making things up, or you are rewriting
| history as GP said.
| happycube wrote:
| Yup, Deja destroyed itself - their interface and IIRC search
| got _much_ worse before the end.
| throw2311 wrote:
| Google of 2001 is not the Google of 2023. If anything its the
| exact opposite.
| foundart wrote:
| ah, dejanews! So many times I plugged a build error message
| into their search and got the exact fix I needed. One search
| and problem solved. That probably wouldn't happen today even if
| they were still around, but it was a great experience to have
| had.
| checkcircuits wrote:
| Finally someone with experience with usenet speaks up. I was
| pretty sad when Google acquired dejanews.
|
| I don't understand the author's concern but perhaps as a person
| who doesnt use Google Groups I don't understand the utility. If
| newsgroups were being used before whats stopping them from
| being used now? You can get a block account for $5 dollars with
| unlimited text access. The only thing different from long ago
| is that most ISPs don't provide free text newsgroup accounts
| anymore. As for the author mailing lists have always worked...
|
| Seems much ado about nothing.
|
| EDIT: Ah I now realize Google Groups was build ON TOP of
| usenet. I see part of the problem. Injecting that history back
| into the annals of the news servers is going to be a challenge.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| As someone who helps maintain some discussion mailing lists
| for a small non-profit, mailing lists "work" inasmuch as the
| email is accepted without error by hosts that, if you're
| lucky, just route it to spam.
| superkuh wrote:
| Usenet still exists and is actually getting better with time.
| There's not much spam and the only people there left are geeks
| that care about the topic. The eternal september is over and
| it's time to start again. You can get text only access for your
| usenet client (or use a web interface) at https://www.eternal-
| september.org/ . I post on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk every
| now and then and get decent conversations. I also posted back
| in the 90s.
|
| Usenet need not rely on google groups mangling of deja news.
| anthk wrote:
| alt.folklore computers
|
| comp.unix*
|
| comp.misc
|
| comp.lang.*
|
| comp.infosystems.gemini
|
| comp.infosystems.gopher
| saltminer wrote:
| And if you want to see idiots fighting,
| comp.os.linux.advocacy
| antod wrote:
| Hmmm... thanks for the update and link to eternal september.
| The way things are these days, I think I'm pretty much ready
| to try a return to usenet.
|
| Ironically although not a student or AOL user back then, my
| usage of usenet was after eternal september....
| jdfellow wrote:
| Google Groups performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish
| maneuver against USENET, by way of their acquisition of DejaNews
| and then implementing their own forum/mailing list interface on
| top if it.
|
| But, I wonder how many communities that are using Google Groups
| would be suitably served by falling back to USENET. I suppose it
| would require some updates to both NNTP server software to be
| easier to administer (if you want to go that route), and
| especially NNTP client readers to be more modern and user-
| friendly.
| squarefoot wrote:
| The extinguish step became crystal clear to me after this:
|
| https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...
|
| As a result, users searching for news, forums and sites with
| people writing about X, from then on would instead find mostly
| companies selling that X.
| sixothree wrote:
| I have a theory related to google products - they can only
| exist if they can capture user data in a manner that is unique
| compared to their other products.
| haolez wrote:
| The problem with USENET is spam. Moderation can be a burden. I
| suppose Google has some systems in place to mitigate this.
| floren wrote:
| At least the last time I looked, Usenet spam was so lazy that
| it was pretty easy to filter: the exact same ads posted again
| and again (filter the article title), or schizophrenics
| posting under the same username 100 times a day (filter the
| name). Usenet _clients_ made it pretty easy, once you learned
| the right commands, to instantly shitcan all future messages
| which matched [sender /title/some string in the body/etc.]
|
| Unfortunately, while it's easy to filter stuff, it means that
| every newcomer sees the unfiltered crap and has to figure out
| filtering for themselves.
| pwg wrote:
| The vast bulk of USENET spam is arriving /from/ google
| groups.
|
| A very effective spam filter is to simply killfile anything
| with an @google.groups message id.
|
| Sadly, that also killfiles the few real posters who use GG,
| so if one wants to continue to see them, one has to add
| them as overrides to the general "kill GG" filter.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Add to the fun GFoogle Groups have stopped carrying some
| groups because they had too much spam. As others noted
| much of it was coming from google groups itself, if only
| it had the spam filters other usenet providers had.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| These days, it should be fairly easy to combat this. Everyone
| subscribes their messages. Client sw allows whitelisting the
| signatures. Whitelisted signatures can vouch for new
| signatures to be added. User can easily silence any
| signature. Messages that are hidden (because the signature is
| not whitelisted) are shown if a whitelisted message replies
| to them.
|
| I'm sure I didn't catch all the edge cases, but the main idea
| is that the system is distributed, built on reputation, and
| self-managed. Everyone is responsible for the content they
| receive.
| giantrobot wrote:
| That's just bozo filters with a side of Web of Trust. It's
| been done. Bozo filters _help_ with spam on the client side
| but don 't do anything about spam on the server side.
| Servers still have to host everything because they can't
| know a priori what clients will want or not.
|
| Not that your idea is necessarily bad but it breaks a lot
| of the utility of Usenet to have whitelist based filtering.
| I can't know ahead of time I like your posts and want to
| whitelist you. I also don't want to have to "know a guy" to
| get involved in a group (via Web of Trust).
| mrweasel wrote:
| It hasn't really been developed, so it's in the same state
| that email would have been in, had it too been abandoned.
|
| The big surprise is that NNTP servers are still running, and
| that there are active newsgroups. With a bit of care I still
| think NNTP could be a nice base for new localized social
| networks. Just in the small "town" where I live there are a
| number of Facebook groups, those could just as easily have
| been newsgroups.
|
| Usenet currently isn't in a great state, and had it not been
| for piracy it would have looked even worse.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Chat AI is going to make combatting spam 100X harder. Imho
| we're reaching the end of our ability to allow anonymous
| contribution to public fora in general.
|
| Which is why I have a conspiracy theory about why conspiracy
| theorists are against "digital ID".
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Which is why I have a conspiracy theory about why
| conspiracy theorists are against "digital ID".
|
| Even if you're not a tinfoil hat wearer, "digital ID"
| projects are fraught with issues:
|
| - private ones can instantly and permanently revoke your
| access _for whatever reason they believe_. Facebook, Google
| and Twitter have shown that often enough. Or they can go
| out of business like many OpenID providers which is even
| worse - you can, given enough resources, even hold Internet
| giants accountable, but it 's impossible to resurrect a
| shuttered service once they delete their keyrings. Or they
| can use information about which services you use to push
| even more detailed ads.
|
| - public (i.e. government-run) ones... you don't want your
| government to know which porn you watch, you don't want the
| government to be able to know what you're writing on
| Reddit, and you don't want the government to be able to
| take away your access to your (digital) assets on a whim
| like the Canadian government did by freezing the bank
| accounts of COVID deniers (note: I support actions against
| COVID deniers, but that's going way more than a few steps
| too far).
| justeleblanc wrote:
| I quite frankly don't care if the government knows what
| porn I watch. I'm really tired of this puritanical-
| inspired take on privacy. Always the same examples.
|
| Freezing assets is completely different, but I don't see
| how that's relevant in the context. You're just waving
| the vague feeling that government is this evil omnipotent
| being.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I quite frankly don't care if the government knows what
| porn I watch. I'm really tired of this puritanical-
| inspired take on privacy.
|
| The thing is, invasive acts against civic freedoms tend
| to be started going against sex workers or be justified
| with sexuality/morals. Just look at Florida and the book
| bans or how sex work is criminalized in a lot of
| countries, including wide parts of the US. Why should I
| trust a government with my porn when it deems it
| necessary to determine under which conditions two adults
| can have consensual sex?
|
| > Freezing assets is completely different, but I don't
| see how that's relevant in the context. You're just
| waving the vague feeling that government is this evil
| omnipotent being.
|
| I'm German. My ancestors abused innoucuous data registers
| to have precise lists on who was to be transported off to
| gas chambers, less than a hundred years ago. I live less
| than 20km from the KZ Dachau, where the Nazis murdered
| tens of thousands of people. That gives a pretty harsh
| view on just how evil governments can become if citizens
| do not care.
| jrapdx3 wrote:
| Many years ago I visited Dachau, truly an eye-opening
| experience. I'm certain many Germans did care what was
| happening but they were quickly silenced or intimidated,
| ultimately powerless to stop the horrific actions of the
| government. I do agree that governments do not always act
| in the interests of citizens. Often enough there's little
| basis for trusting officials or the bureaucracies that
| rule everywhere.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Emergencies Act was 100% necessary because the Canadian
| gov't does not have access to the kind of internal forces
| that the US does. They have to rely on municipal and
| provincial police forces who'd shown total disinterest in
| doing their jobs. The inquiry found that.
|
| And the existence of digital ID doesn't mean it's
| mandatory for systems to use it. Why would a porn site
| _want_ to authenticate their users against digital ID?
| And if some porn sites don 't, why would anybody
| patronize one that did?
|
| What matters is that the option needs to be there -
| people running a service need to be able to say "I want
| to be able to know which of my users are real humans, and
| to be able to revoke said humans permanently if
| necessary".
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > They have to rely on municipal and provincial police
| forces who'd shown total disinterest in doing their jobs.
| The inquiry found that.
|
| Well, the solution is to take over municipal and
| provincial police forces and make sure they do their
| jobs. The solution is _not_ to freeze people 's bank
| accounts.
|
| > Why would a porn site want to authenticate their users
| against digital ID? And if some porn sites don't, why
| would anybody patronize one that did?
|
| Because this is the situation in Germany and IIRC also
| the UK. (Guess the number of German porn sites Germans
| use - next to none)
|
| > What matters is that the option needs to be there -
| people running a service need to be able to say "I want
| to be able to know which of my users are real humans, and
| to be able to revoke said humans permanently if
| necessary".
|
| It's precisely the _other way_ around. People should
| demand they can use any legal service anonymously, and it
| should be the default option to keep as much of a service
| anonymously usable - in fact, this is one of the core
| principles of the GDPR, to minimize the data anyone has.
| Pxtl wrote:
| To _consume_? Yes, I agree that should be anonymous. But
| to contribute? It 's ridiculous to demand that a provider
| be willing to host your content, even simple comments,
| without knowing who you are.
|
| > Well, the solution is to take over municipal and
| provincial police forces and make sure they do their jobs
|
| Uh, I suspect you had a different opinion about how the
| government should keep law enforcement at arm's length
| when it was about the Attorney General.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > To consume? Yes, I agree that should be anonymous. But
| to contribute? It's ridiculous to demand that a provider
| be willing to host your content, even simple comments,
| without knowing who you are.
|
| That is precisely why virtually all countries have
| privileges for services hosting user-generated content on
| the Internet.
|
| Unfortunately, both wide parts on the right and less wide
| but still significant parts of the left want to cut that
| privilege in the US, and that is Just Not Good At All.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Anonymous boards will probably stick around but become near
| worthless and be superficially filled with colourful low
| effort posts.
|
| None of us are anonymous to the three letter agencies, isps
| and web services without layers of extra protection.
|
| The idea that humility is hiding but also that we all must
| be watched to keep us from screwing up, will continue as
| normal in the US.
|
| I would suggest that the old rationalist view that privacy
| is in anonymity would be changed to privacy existing for
| the unknown citizen, the internet user that is off-the-map
| or leaves no trace. Popular VPNs already have started this
| journey by obscuring your country's location.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Right. I'm not saying that real identity should be
| mandatory throughout the internet, but that providers
| should be able to confirm real identity before allowing
| people to contribute content to their boards.
|
| For reference, I'm rate-limited here on Hacker News
| because I'm politically opinionated and don't shy away
| from angry arguments. Would this be a better site if I
| went and created a new account every time Dang got
| annoyed with me?
|
| Otherwise any open text entry box will get flooded by AIs
| that are completely indistinguishable from human content.
| Basically the existing problems with troll-farms and
| spam-bots and hackers will get magnified order of
| magnitude. Repeatedly, as the tech becomes better and
| cheaper.
| roerdhh wrote:
| There would also be the question how to archive old messages -
| i.e. one of the main problems Dejanews originally solved for
| the Usenet community.
| nerdo wrote:
| Just like when Google performed the classic embrace-extend-
| extinguish maneuver against GOPHER.
| eterm wrote:
| Huh? Gopher was dead before google existed.
| cp9 wrote:
| next people are going to say google ruined the stone tablet
| by inventing paper.
|
| google has done a lot of stuff I don't agree with, we don't
| need to make stuff up!
| magicalist wrote:
| This always comes up in these threads and I always wonder if
| the commenters ever actually used Usenet.
|
| DejaNews isn't and never was Usenet, it was an archive, and
| Google Groups was just another Usenet client. Google Groups
| embrace-extend-extinguished Usenet as much as Gmail embrace-
| extend-extinguished email, and it got some cachet from having
| historical posts.
|
| You can still use Usenet as much as you could 20 years ago, and
| while it was nice a decade or two ago to be able to browse
| historical threads in google groups, now the Internet Archive
| has an excellent Usenet archive[1] so we don't have to trust a
| giant corporation with ADD to hold onto history for us.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > Gmail embrace-extend-extinguished email
|
| I don't get your point; because google did that to e-mail. By
| using gmail or their paid product through g-suite, you get to
| be in the high QoS lane for e-mail delivery and get through
| their spam filter.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Ironically, in recent experience I've found Google Groups
| email routed to spam in Gmail, even with a Gmail-based
| sender and recipient.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Google Suite and Gmail are not the only ways to get through
| spam filters, and since when has latency been an issue? Do
| you know what "extinguish" means? Because that does not
| sound like "extinguish" and only _barely_ scratches the
| surface of "extend".
|
| If anything, Gmail's spam filters are absolute shit,
| judging by all the random spam that blasts through. It's a
| colander at this point.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| That's a historically inaccurate view. Usenet was well on its
| way to cultural irrelevance long before Google bought DejaNews.
| Google bought Deja to rescue it, it was literally days from
| failing entirely and was a huge scramble to bring their archive
| online at Google. There was no grand strategy to bootstrap Deja
| into a forum product, Google had no strategy at all for forum /
| social media in that era. Google didn't implement anything "on
| top of Deja", the code base was entirely abandoned, all that
| was brought over was the archive and maybe some tools for
| cleaning data.
|
| Proposing "fall back to Usenet" in 2023 makes about as much
| sense as "folks who use Slack should just use IRC".
| ttkciar wrote:
| > Proposing "fall back to Usenet" in 2023 makes about as much
| sense as "folks who use Slack should just use IRC".
|
| Hey! :-( IRC is still alive and kicking, thank you very much!
| throw7 wrote:
| I miss nntp. Gmane used to be my goto after nntp use fell off,
| but that died also (I get it though... the work to keep that
| working is not something I would want to do).
| taviso wrote:
| I'm still a daily gmane user, thankfully you're mistaken and
| it's still alive and well, just nntp only (news.gmane.io)! I
| honestly don't know what I would do if it did die, it's such a
| large part of how I use the internet.
| throw7 wrote:
| I'll check things out again later. At some point I remember
| things getting unstable and not being able to post messages
| (this was when the original owner was giving up).
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Gmane nntp access still works and I don't think has had any
| issues.
|
| The web interface to gmane has gone (due to self admitted
| errors by the original owner)
| sideproject wrote:
| For community forums and tools somewhat similar to Google Groups,
| I've recently launched HN+
|
| https://www.hn.plus
|
| I've always wanted to create my own HN clone and use it for
| myself. Yes, there are many many forum tools out there :)
| bborud wrote:
| Has anyone looked at modernizing NNTP in the past decade?
| pasc1878 wrote:
| What new features does it need?
|
| And I think make it in the last three decades.
| p41nt wrote:
| I wish there was a modern email listserv for people to subscribe
| / unsubscribe and maybe manage posting permissions for. Using
| chat servers or forums is an extra barrier for people to overcome
| and prevents collaboration from a broader set of people. Mailgun
| kind of has a list service that works. But not an easy way for
| end users to self manage.
|
| Curious if anyone could recommend something that could be
| selfhosted or worth paying for?
| skim1420 wrote:
| I don't disagree with the core point that long-horizon, FOSS
| communities should think twice before operating atop services
| like Google Groups. Also the particular quality atrophy and
| feature degradation sucks.
|
| Perhaps it's better framed to say that Groups is not prioritizing
| the particular users that the author is speaking on behalf of
| (ack, the monospace thing is a serious bug beyond FOSS
| communities). Google Groups and the shared infrastructure
| underneath is a critical piece of GSuite and GCP in many places,
| and I'd be very surprised if it ended up on the Killed By Google
| list.
| steren wrote:
| Google Groups actually received a very big UI refresh ~ 2 years
| ago. I bet that was a complete re-write of the UI stack, not
| something you see for a product which would have been left to
| die.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Every now and then I wonder with a twinge of fear how long until
| GMail makes it to the top of the list of potential axes on some
| mid level execs desk looking for cost centers to cut.
| sfc32 wrote:
| Good!
| javajosh wrote:
| It's interesting to consider this genre, the "community website".
| The primary functions are chat, forums, maybe a wiki or a blog.
| So a "community website" is _a union of all the modes people use
| to communicate on the web_.
|
| Therefore the solution is going to be a curated compose.yml that
| runs best-in-class versions of each thing with baked-in identity
| configuration and its own strong community around data movement
| between processes. Imagine a website that helps users build their
| own compose.yml based on their choice of components, similar to
| https://start.spring.io/.
|
| However, even if you had this, the "exercise for the reader" will
| be substantial: get a domain name and a host, learn to admin
| linux and docker. Finally get the compose file and run it. And
| learn to troubleshoot each process, with its unique runtime and
| build, when things go wrong. This is a heavy investment, but
| probably worth it. Kind of like learning to work on your own car.
| dingosity wrote:
| If only there were a protocol for distribution of MIME messages
| across a distributed network of computers. Alas. We may never
| find a solution that is not tied to a specific vendor.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| This is sarcasm right? The answer being SMTP and email.
| howard941 wrote:
| NNTP?
| dingosity wrote:
| yup.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| How do you add a new group for your new project?
| ericand wrote:
| Or- great work to Google for maintaining a product that has waned
| in popularity and not killing it off!
| proser wrote:
| Mentioned elsewhere, but Groups is a core part of their
| business offering. It's how lists and permissions get set up in
| lots of orgs using Google for enterprise email, docs, etc. View
| it as an extension of that and you can understand why consumer
| facing features seem stagnant.
| zzzeek wrote:
| right, use github discussions. then come back here in 5 years for
| "github discussions has been left to die" as we will all using
| Corporate Antigravitity Chat Discussions then, obviously
| asah wrote:
| Groups for Business seems to be thriving and has many new
| features, especially for admins.
|
| (it's well integrated with free/consumer Groups, and I assume
| they use the same codebase, i.e. consumer Groups is just a tiny
| subset)
| scottfr wrote:
| Google Groups is heavily used within Google's ecosystem.
| Specifically it is:
|
| - a system for managing group-based access for Google Workspace
| users, e.g. share a Google Doc with a group to give all members
| access
|
| - a system for managing group-based access to Google Cloud
| Platform resources, e.g. share a BigQuery table with a Google
| Group to give all group members access to it.
|
| - a simple way for Google Workspace users to create shared email
| addresses. e.g. support@mycompany.com
|
| It serves these purposes quite well.
| danpalmer wrote:
| App beta distribution on Play.
|
| Also this is just the external user facing side. Internally
| Google Groups are used extensively for all sorts of things.
| sn_master wrote:
| Also, don't Google emails by default have a 6 months expiry and
| the Groups is a way to preserve knowledge instead of relying on
| emails?
| guiambros wrote:
| By default there's no Gmail expiration (that I know of).
| Deleted messages are kept in the Trash folder for 30 days and
| then permanently deleted, but archived emails exist forever
| (provided you still have space left).
| mugsie wrote:
| Is that not "Google Groups for Workspaces" vs the newsgroups
| style public Google Groups this article is talking about?
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's the same thing...
| ROFISH wrote:
| Simple shared email addresses maybe, but Groups is far from
| "Shared Gmail" when it comes to even basic features like
| tagging and archiving.
| nocommandline wrote:
| Some of them have migrated away from Google Groups
|
| Example - Google App Engine group has moved away from Google
| Groups to Google Cloud Community [1]
|
| 1. https://groups.google.com/g/google-appengine
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Google Groups in GCP appears to be moving to the Cloud Identity
| product, so it's plausible that Google Groups (the product)
| might be languishing while the internals are copied into other
| systems? (Or maybe nothing is being copied and Cloud Identity
| is just exposing another view into Google Groups?)
| eitally wrote:
| I think it's more than using Groups in the prior way was
| really more of a hack than an appropriate, mature solution
| for that piece of IEM, and now GCP has a product that's fit
| for purpose.
|
| Fwiw, internally at Google, Groups is used for
| membership/access management in a "light" (self-administered
| for access to things that usually aren't particular
| sensitive) way, but for more serious ACLs there are other
| products. The nice thing about Groups is just that it's dead
| easy for non-technical users, and it solves the other problem
| which is retention of email content for longer than Google's
| retention policy -- IOW, tribal knowledge.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Yes, Google Groups is used for much more than emails. That's
| not the point of the article though.
| lelandfe wrote:
| I believe the subtext of that comment is that they feel it
| can't be "left to die" as Groups is too important in the
| ecosystem.
| jks wrote:
| Yes, but for those purposes it doesn't matter if the email
| features are left to die, such as the monospace fonts that
| don't render or the message read/unread status that's
| flaky.
| lrem wrote:
| I find it surprising that people use the groups webapp as
| a way to read the email. Isn't your email client more
| convenient?
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, but never beem responsible for
| anything close to Groups.
| tylerhou wrote:
| People send emails with monospace fonts to internal
| Google Groups all the time. If there is a bug in the
| external Groups, there likely? is a bug in the internal
| Groups. If that's true, then it will be fixed soon.
|
| The internal read/unread indicator has always been janky
| as well. But the point is that Google depends too much on
| Groups internally to let it die.
| Octokiddie wrote:
| > GitHub is wonderful now but fundamentally proprietary, same as
| Google Groups, and FOSS software forges like sourcehut are making
| great progress.
|
| It may be impossible to imagine now, but a similarly craptaculous
| outcome for GitHub should not be ruled out. Back when SourceForge
| was revered as the be-all, end-all of open source development,
| few could imagine a future in which the service just kept getting
| worse and worse.
| altairprime wrote:
| Discussion forums are not a viable substitute for encoding solved
| problems into documentation. This will continue to be a new
| discovery each time a service shuts down. If a solution is not
| incorporated your effort's formal documentation, then that
| solution will eventually be lost. Trying to shift the burden of
| documenting solutions from the project to the forum archives,
| whether hosted or outsourced, will eventually fail.
| debacle wrote:
| I just started using Google Groups and love it. Is it going by
| the wayside?
| [deleted]
| modeless wrote:
| Google groups will never die because Google uses it to manage
| internal mailing lists.
| myelin wrote:
| Came here to say this... Google Groups has a _ton_ of use
| internally.
| troyastorino wrote:
| Google groups is also the mechanism for defining groups for
| viewing/editing permissions, comments, calendar invites, etc
| across Google Workspace and for access permissions in GCP. That
| group definition aligns nicely with being a mailing list
| grouping. Those use cases are not going to go away, and I would
| expect Google will invest in them more (as Workspace has been
| an area that Google has significantly invested in, and I'd
| argue has been doing a good job).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think this is a key point that many people don't realize.
| The ACL groups and mailing lists you create in Google
| Workspace are _the same_ groups you see when you go to
| groups.google.com. This is absolutely integral to Google
| Workspace as you point out and isn 't going anywhere.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| If this really is true then @AlbertCory's comment earlier
| in this thread about there just being one guy working on
| Groups is absolutely terrifying.
| cmh89 wrote:
| Couldn't they just bring it internal? It must cost a good deal
| of money to keep it going, even if its not actively worked on.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| It's used heavily by many other companies that pay for Google
| Workspace too.
| LastTrain wrote:
| So, how does one host a forum that will outlive the current
| ownership and members? What are the options out there? Create a
| collection at archive.org and do regular dumps there?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Google groups is widely used internally to Google. it isn't going
| away anytime soon.
| j2kun wrote:
| Weird because Google groups is heavily used internally at Google.
| Unless there's an internal replacement coming, I don't see how it
| could die.
| jdulay19 wrote:
| As an outsider, why wouldn't anyone just migrate this to
| Slack/Discord/etc?
| patja wrote:
| Slack is prohibitively expensive if you need more than 90 days
| of history, and Discord isn't very open or great for search.
| shagie wrote:
| The question is "what type of interaction are you after?"
|
| Chat systems are good for the "I need help now" and "I want to
| chat..." but for some things a single message takes an hour or
| day or more thought to formulate a proper response.
|
| In those situations, the real time nature of chat causes
| discussions of a topic to become disjoint.
|
| USENET, email, forums and the like can have single topic
| threads / chains / posts where one topic is followed across
| days or weeks or months which is sometimes needed for hard
| problems.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Been a long slow decline, it's frustrating to watch it degrade.
| Imagine being an engineer assigned to this unloved thing; or
| worse, a product manager. Career death.
|
| https://groups.io is a good replacement for email lists. It's
| mostly a for-pay product.
|
| https://www.usenetarchives.com/ is a good search engine for
| pre-2000 Usenet. Like Google's old Deja archive which has been
| nearly unusable via Google Groups for years now.
| itamarst wrote:
| https://groups.io is good for mailing lists, yes.
| summerlight wrote:
| Not sure why it has a perception of being abandoned. IIRC, it
| still has a considerably larger team compared to other real dying
| products. Also it has a clear role inside the Google Workspace.
| It's obviously prioritizing enterprise users, but it doesn't
| necessarily mean public groups are being shut down anytime soon.
| Animats wrote:
| Does it still gateway to Usenet? Could people just use Usenet
| without Google?
| pwg wrote:
| Yes. Either buy a low cost USENET account from a commercial
| provider, or sign up at http://www.eternal-september.org/ and
| then use a real USENET client (which will be better for
| interacting with USENET than the awful interface that is google
| groups).
| Animats wrote:
| Maybe all that's needed here is a better USENET client.
| anthk wrote:
| slrn it's fine. Killing SPAM it's very easy to do.
| phneutral26 wrote:
| [flagged]
| qwertox wrote:
| I never understood how Discord can be seen as a replacement for
| mailing lists. To me it is the absolute chaos from a usability
| viewpoint and possibly a good place to chat about things which
| are not to be seen as persistent.
|
| To me the main alternative would be a Discourse-based platform,
| which can be seen as an evolution to the traditional PHP-based
| bulletin boards.
|
| I really hope that Google Groups doesn't shut down, but at this
| point I'm close to believing that Google care to disappoint. Then
| again, aren't a lot of Android development discussions taking
| place on Google Groups?
| kazinator wrote:
| They should switch to a Usenet newsgroup. Then they could keep
| using the same awful web interface that they are used to, for the
| time being, and gradually start switch to NNTP-based newsreaders.
| klodolph wrote:
| I would love to hear some recommendations for ways to build
| communities and discussion forums that are a bit more robust.
|
| Been seeing a minor resurgence of phpBB sites, as a reaction to
| the problems inherent in Discord and Reddit. When I research
| forum software, it seems like the space has more or less
| stagnated over the past 20 years, except for a couple paid
| offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month).
|
| Some of the options I like in this space are newsgroups,
| majordomo mailing lists (with public archives), and phpBB. These
| pieces of software all had a long lifespan, and have some good
| qualities when it comes to archiving discussions and ease of use.
| Obviously, newsgroups are no longer a viable option. It does seem
| like we could do better these days, without outsourcing our
| communities to Reddit or Discord.
| biorach wrote:
| > except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is
| $50/month).
|
| You can self-host Discourse
|
| I've set it up for a local community group. Was straighforward
| and not resource hungry for a small community
| epaulson wrote:
| An open source project I'm involved with is thinking about its
| communications future, since we're currently on Google Groups and
| have been nervous about it for a while.
|
| The leading contenders for us are either groups.io for a more
| email-list-focused setup, or Discourse, for a more web-forum
| focus but that has a (hopefully decent?) email-only interface.
|
| For "realtime" chat, which we don't really do today but are
| getting pressured to have something, we are thinking gitter.im
|
| Most of us grew up on either Usenet or Majordomo/Mailman lists
| and still have an email-first preference, since once the message
| is delivered anyone can handle it in their own workflow and with
| their own tools.
| pentagrama wrote:
| 5+ years ago I participate on a project who started a community
| from the ground up using a self-hosted https://discourse.org.
|
| The experience was pretty great, the user experience in general
| is good, onboarding is straight forward, is mobile friendly, it
| has email and in-app notifications for replies, weekly digests
| and more. And you own the data!
|
| Later down the road, a chat platform was necessary too, and we
| use Telegram channels for that. I remember considering some
| OSS/Self-Hosted options for that but Telegram was really easy and
| the trade-off was worth it.
| davidw wrote:
| What's really crazy to me is that I'm on a local Google Group for
| the cycling community in the city I'm in.
|
| I somewhat regularly fish stuff out of my Gmail spam folder that
| went from
|
| Someone's personal gmail account -> Google Group -> My Gmail
| account.
|
| The message never left Google's infrastructure, and it's still
| being flagged as spam! They should have a lot of insight into
| those messages and be able to ascertain that it is not spam.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's crowd-sourced. If there are gmail users that have marked
| traffic from that group as spam, it is spam. Doing anything
| else would violate the neutrality of Google with respect to
| classification, and probably upset eurocrats of various
| flavors.
| em-bee wrote:
| a lot of gmail accounts are used to send spam, so having a
| gmail account as a source is not an indication of quality, and
| those need to be filtered just as much.
| davidw wrote:
| You'd think that having some data about the sending account
| would allow them to be more confident. They should know that
| it's not a spam account - or if it is, act on it?
| delfinom wrote:
| The problem is gmail's infrastructure is most likely (a)
| built for speed and processing the billions of emails a day
| and (b) legacy, it probably has none of the access to
| Google's modern infrastructure such as rating gmail account
| "quality"
| david_allison wrote:
| This also happens with Google-owned projects. A fair amount of
| Google Summer of Code communication goes to spam.
| [deleted]
| Alex3917 wrote:
| FWIW I recently wrote a Discourse plug-in proposal to help
| communities migrate their existing content from Google Groups to
| Discourse, while giving members who prefer email the ability to
| fully participate from their inbox without any major changes from
| the current Google Groups experience. I didn't get a ton of
| interest so I haven't moved forward in productizing this, but all
| of the email parsing code is already written (and in production),
| so I can still ship a plug-in if this is something that other
| folks actually care about:
|
| https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposed-plugin-to-improve-repl...
| bloppe wrote:
| Just use matrix. There are plenty of places that will host your
| rooms for free, and some will do it for a price. It's always
| possible that your host ("home server") will not last forever,
| and I'm not an expert on home server mobility, but it's certainly
| currently much better than any proprietary host, and the
| important part is that the community is empowered by the protocol
| to solve the problems they need solved, including mobility and
| longevity, if need be. But that's just a worst-case scenario. It
| would be surprising to have to solve these problems yourself.
| bentley wrote:
| Realtime chat platforms like Matrix necessitate an entirely
| different sort of moderation compared to a traditional mailing
| list/forum-style community.
| gtk40 wrote:
| We use Google Groups for a non-profit I'm involved with and it
| works well. Not sure on a replacement that will work well for us
| yet.
| mercacona wrote:
| Check if your country has public-funded LISTSERV/Mailman/*
| instances. If not, I'll check https://gaggle.email
| shagie wrote:
| What are the requirements / key features of Google Groups that
| you use?
| jmclnx wrote:
| This is one of many free replacements for google groups. I have
| been using that for years.
|
| https://www.newsgroupreviews.com/eternal-september.html
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Not exactly it does newsgroups only which is a small part of
| Goole groups.
|
| Most of Google Groups is mailing lists which can just be
| created unlike a newsgroup.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Checkout Topicbox by Fastmail... fills the niche perfectly!
| rexreed wrote:
| Is it for a mailing list or for a website archive? You can
| self-host a listserv on many shared hosting sites for pennies.
| cauthon wrote:
| I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.
| capableweb wrote:
| Hackers and spammers too. Famously bad security (which somehow
| got PHP got blamed for, rather than specific software)
| principles.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I remember how many mods for phpBB were installed by
| literally doing find/replaces on the source files. Absolutely
| insane we had people out there doing that who didn't know any
| PHP!
| amenghra wrote:
| PHP got blamed for because it handed developers guns to shoot
| themselves in the foot with.
| cauthon wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not a web dev, but I assumed there were one or more
| technical limitations that led to its decline.
|
| I liked the interface, and the familiarity when seemingly
| every small-to-medium forum online was built on it.
|
| Plus they were all scrapable. There's a ton of information
| that's hard or impossible to find now that these
| conversations are typically siloed in slack or discord.
| Zak wrote:
| In fairness, early PHP often made it much easier to do the
| wrong thing than the right thing while simultaneously
| targeting beginner web developers.
| EGreg wrote:
| Why not Discourse? It has 34% of the discussion market now
| SteveMoody73 wrote:
| Only used discourse in a limited way but it lacks the
| searchability of the old forums. I can't imagine how much
| useful information has been lost when some of these sites
| have shut down.
|
| Discussions on a well run forum would be on topic with
| various people adding to a conversaion, discussions on a
| single topic seems to get lost on these chat apps
| syntheticnature wrote:
| You're thinking of Discord, not Discourse.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| >Only used discourse in a limited way but it lacks the
| searchability of the old forums.
|
| Are you saying that discourse lacks search _features_ , or
| that most discourse forums don't have the "history" that
| old forums do?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Not OP, but I struggle with Discourse search, both in
| terms of usability (not quite good) and presentation -
| both D. itself and it's search is made by someone who
| _doesn 't_ need to exchange information and persist it.
| After some attempts I just fallback to external search
| with 'site:domain.tld search term'.
|
| Wasting 90% of my screen real estate while actually
| hiding useful information isn't helping too.
| tester756 wrote:
| Discourse doesn't feel like old, real forums.
|
| phpBB has nicer layout
| facorreia wrote:
| The article answers that question.
| __derek__ wrote:
| Can you link to research behind that? I'm really curious how
| this defines the "discussion" market.
| EGreg wrote:
| https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/forum-software
| __derek__ wrote:
| Oh, that's disappointing, but it answers the question of
| how the market is defined for the quoted statistic.
| [deleted]
| lacker wrote:
| I love open source but I think this analysis misses the real
| problem. In 2023, communities built purely on "mailing list"
| style tools are much less engaging and useful than communities
| that allow live discussions.
|
| For example, the author refers to the SMT-LIB google group. There
| has only been one message posted there in the last month! That
| isn't a "google groups" problem, it's a "nobody wants to use a
| mailing list any more" problem.
|
| I don't think using open source tools would have solved this
| issue. Mailman is open source and for a long time was the obvious
| open source alternative to Google Groups but hardly anyone is
| recommending that you migrate from Google Groups to Mailman!
|
| That said, there's nothing wrong with looking for an open source
| solution. It makes sense to try open source tools when you're
| talking about a community built around open source software.
| Zulip seems worth a try.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Looking back, it's quite surprising how stagnant, in some sense,
| the social media space has become. How centralised and how...
| lame.
|
| The big hitters really did pillage and burn. Now, between
| moderation norms becoming increasingly sensitive and the hard
| turn the web took away from open... It's hard to see any new form
| take off.
|
| That said, perhaps that means it's a perfect time.
|
| Groups/Usenet has its limitations. Features invented over the
| last 30 years have value. Usenet can't be our YouTube or
| Facebook. But.. I refuse to believe open protocols got so much of
| the job done for so long, but the last mile requires a unicorn to
| platformize it.
|
| There aren't that many hurdles to taking social media back.
| Login/identity. HN demonstrates that this can be relatively
| simple. Hosting. Not quite as simple, apparently. Moderation.
| Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be
| better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway.
|
| There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again?
| kerpotgh wrote:
| [dead]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media
| again?
|
| Because any kind of social media, especially when it allows
| binary assets, _will_ be abused by CSAM and piracy spreaders,
| by Holocaust deniers, by scammers, by spammers shilling dick
| enlargement pills, questionably "legal" drugs, questionable
| dietary supplements or all kinds of other stuff, by trolls
| bullying people right up to suicide "for the lulz", or as we're
| seeing in the wake of the Russian invasion by enemy propaganda.
|
| > Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community
| tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation
| anyway.
|
| Nope. Reddit's various cesspools, from lolicon to the_donald
| [1], show that any platform needs centralized moderation lest
| it became overrun by any of the groups listed above.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
| drstewart wrote:
| >You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa".
|
| Yeah, I wonder why you're only concerned about right wing
| trolling - left wing abuse is a-okay with you?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Do tell, where exactly is the left engaged in hate speech
| campaigns that come even close to the amount of abuse from
| the right wing? Not to mention domestic terrorism?
|
| Both in the US and Germany, the answer is "an utterly
| dominant majority comes from the right wing".
| nativeit wrote:
| Some twat in Berkeley swatted blindly at a vaguely
| sympathetic individual with a bike lock, and combined
| with the perception of a condescending attitude towards
| rural Americans, I guess that means the non-entity
| "antifa" has forfeit some moral high ground to push back
| on the multi-million collection of assault weapons right-
| wing militias wield with little to no formal training and
| at best a tenuous grasp on American history and/or
| objective reality, or the never ending smorgasbord of
| violence and trauma it causes.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Are you just blanking out on the whole of the 1965-1980?
| Domestic terrorism has always been the wheelhouse of the
| left for the USA. It's only very recently the right has
| been getting involved and still has a long way to go to
| get close. Once we start getting monthly bombings we can
| call it "even" and then push it father to get to "an
| utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing" what
| revisionist history.
|
| People seem to have forgotten just how much political
| violence used to happen in this country. I can't see any
| other reason you'd make such a ridiculous assertion.
| ttkciar wrote:
| > Are you just blanking out on the whole of the
| 1965-1980?
|
| If you have to dig back half a century to make your point
| about contemporary events, you have effectively ceded the
| point.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| It was one of the politically violent periods that people
| are still alive, and it happened recently enough still
| working, from. I really don't think using the most
| extreme period in very recent history is ceding any
| point....
| smcl wrote:
| Well it is if we're talking about online abuse and the
| role of social media in enabling real life violence. Last
| I checked there weren't too many social media users back
| in 1965-1980.
| smcl wrote:
| You pulled that out of mschuster91's profile as an own, but
| actually I think that means they're probably pretty chill.
| I probably wouldn't have known that about them otherwise,
| thanks for sharing it!
| dalbasal wrote:
| I don't agree.
|
| First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on
| twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other
| stuff.
|
| Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web,
| and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's.
| It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major
| commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets
| and is under constant criticism for being spendy.
|
| Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The
| variety there makes it a good place for examples. But, Reddit
| was a commery startup that got bought many moons ago into a
| media conglomerate. It's not the examle of free.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Lol what? Wikipedia has EXTREME moderation, from locking
| contentious articles, to hyper nerds spending all their
| free time browsing edit histories to revert dumb changes
| middle school kids made, to active efforts to undo the work
| that literal nation-state actors have done, to having to
| ban the offices of American politicians and political
| contractors who OFFER SERVICES TO REMOVE YOUR CONTENT FROM
| WIKIPEDIA
|
| It hasn't been "anyone can edit anything" since like 2008!
| zamnos wrote:
| I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah,
| you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if
| you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able
| to write effectively about electronically controlled
| pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I
| don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield,
| Ohio, and want to add things to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment,
| you can just click the edit button and add stuff.
|
| Anyone with an Internet connection can go to their
| website or load up their app and hit [edit] and make
| changes, and it's been that way since 2001. There's not
| even a user account required for most. There are those
| that get caught up by wide IP-based blocks against middle
| schooler spam, and they do have to create a user account.
| omoikane wrote:
| I am not sure Wikipedia is a social network, in the sense
| that most users aren't there to have discussions or earn
| followers or do other typical social network things. Also,
| Wikipedia is very much moderated.
|
| Wikipedia is unlike the original Wikiwiki Web
| (https://wiki.c2.com/) which had discussion threads on the
| same page as articles, and feels more like a social
| network. On this page:
|
| https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks
|
| it explains that things work because it's easy to roll back
| to the previous version, a feature that is shared by
| Wikipedia.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Dear god, you can't use Wikipedia. The abusive moderation
| is incredible on that site. Not a project I'd ever
| recommend contributing to!
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread
| on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other
| stuff.
|
| Islamist content gets rigorously moderated on all networks
| you mention, for years now. The far-right was similarly
| acted against, but at least in the case of Twitter Musk
| reversed a lot of their bans, with the expected result of
| people spreading Nazi vocabulary or Holocaust denialism
| right afterwards.
|
| > Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything
| web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational
| war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the
| major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their
| budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy.
|
| Most of Wikipedia's moderation is done by unpaid
| volunteers, sans legal issues which are handled by WMF via
| executive actions. They run a dead simple tech stack, with
| most being served out of highly optimized caches.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Honestly while not good "lolicon to the_donald" are the least
| of Reddit's problems and why it's gone crazy.
|
| The moderation of /r/politics /r/new and other
| massive/default subreddits combined with how the admins now
| step in on random communities to impose whatever moral view
| they happen to have that week has effectually caused the site
| to diverge hilariously far from reality. If anything Reddit
| is an example of how more moderation can make a community
| more extreme rather then less.
| thestepafter wrote:
| Is anyone else experiencing where they have a paid Google
| business subscription for Gmail, Drive, etc and receive emails
| about posts to their Google group but even as an admin you are
| unable to access the content in the links? I never setup Google
| groups for my company but I receive an alert every time a spammer
| posts something. There has been no response from Google support
| on this.
| jedberg wrote:
| > It's clear we ran afoul of the old lesson: don't build
| communities for long-lasting FOSS projects on proprietary
| infrastructure you don't control. We should not use Discord. So
| what should we use?
|
| An NNTP server and an IRC server?
|
| I understand that Google Groups was a really nice interface to
| NNTP, and all the real-time chat apps have better UX than IRC,
| but it seems like now is a great time to "go back to basics".
| Maybe IRC and NNTP would get some great client improvements if a
| bunch of open source groups settled on it?
| anthk wrote:
| If you want IM+videoconference+file transfers (and emojis),
| Jabber. Public places to discuss stuff, IRC. Decentralized
| fora, NNTP+TLS.
| nightpool wrote:
| Google Groups has survived 22 years. How many self-hosted
| Discourse forums can say the same? If you're working on a new,
| small side-project like a new formal evaluator, are you going to
| want to spend your limited administrative bandwidth onboarding
| new contributors, responding to feature suggestions, talking to
| users, etc, or are you going to want to spend it trying to
| wrangle self-hosted forum administration and figure out email
| delivery? the article has a one-line tossed off aside at the end
| to say "Certainly self-hosted FOSS communities can die, but these
| are functions of community activity itself rather than the
| service they're hosted on", but without considering that the
| absolute most _crucial_ time for community resources to survive
| is through periods of lackluster or nonexistent community
| involvement. If you have a Google Group full of, say, formal
| methods programming experts, then it can spend 5 years fallow and
| still be chock-full of absolutely vital historical resources and
| even spring back into life as people start using it again for
| discussion. That sort of longevity just can 't exist if someone
| stopped paying the hosting bills for their self-hosted TLA
| discourse forum 3 years in.
| LegitShady wrote:
| nerd argument and fanfiction site spacebattles.com
|
| https://forums.spacebattles.com/history/
|
| I'm sure there are lots of niche sites that have lasted as
| long. Thats just off the top of my head.
| rob wrote:
| https://offtopic.com/ is still going and I believe it started
| in 2000?
| livrem wrote:
| I still visit some web forums that has been online since the
| 90's. At least two still use the same ancient software that
| they have used since ~1995. One of those is shut down a few
| hours every night (US time) for "database maintenance". I
| find that more adorable than annoying.
|
| Used to hate web-forums. Usability is so bad compared to
| USENET. But now they are goldmines of probably unique
| content, and far better than Discord or Facebook Groups.
| LegitShady wrote:
| xenforo that spacebattles is based on seems pretty good,
| but it appears to be a package deal with hosting (which I
| suppose funds its development).
|
| https://xenforo.com/purchase/
|
| edit: found a license only page:
|
| https://xenforo.com/purchase/#licenses
|
| but it seems you only get 1 year of updates for the $160,
| and then you have to pay the fee again, so even if its
| lifetime use you will probably want to continue to pay for
| security or whatever else updates.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| AtariAge.com[1] - first created in 1988, or 25 years ago. Run
| by some bloke on the internet.
|
| The problem for Google Groups is that no-one can perf-farm it
| any more, which is the sole reason for projects to survive at
| Google...
|
| 1: https://atariage.com/about.php
| cbzbc wrote:
| perf-farm ? I think I might know what you mean, but could you
| unpack?
| notacoward wrote:
| Not the person who used the term, but I kind of wish I had
| been. It's excellent. At FAANG-ish companies where "impact"
| is the key to promotion, there's an inevitable tendency for
| engineers to prefer working on things that are _highly
| visible_ like starting new projects or adding new features,
| vs. things that are _highly useful_ like stability,
| testing, or code quality. Most internally promoted E6s or
| above got that way by initiating multiple projects, then
| dumping them on others when they 've served their perf-
| review-enhancing purpose. "Perf farming" is as good a term
| as I've seen for it.
| vl wrote:
| > Most internally promoted E6s or above got that way by
| initiating multiple projects, then dumping them on others
|
| Well, Jeff and Sanjay got to DE/Fellows this way, so this
| is a good role model. Unfortunately doesn't scale.
| scrlk wrote:
| I assume it's gaming the Google performance review system
| in order for promotion. That's why you see new Google
| products/features launched, then left to wither in the sun
| - ongoing maintenance/support doesn't do anything for your
| career.
| pdxandi wrote:
| Just a note that 1988 was, gulp, 35 years ago.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Just a note, Star Wars was released closer to World War 2,
| than today's date.
|
| Makes you feel really old.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 1977-1945=32 2023-1977=46 2023-32=1991
|
| Quite a bit closer!
|
| That's an interesting note, given that the Tie/X-wing
| fights were heavily inspired by WW2 dogfights, right? Can
| you imagine something that draws on the Gulf War
| similarly? It just seems wrong, too proximate to pull out
| purely aesthetic themes.
| coliveira wrote:
| WW2 had an immense importance in the minds of people who
| lived it. Gulf War... who even cares about it, except for
| the ones involved? Many people don't even remember that.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Which of the gulfwars are you even talking about? - Even
| Korea and Vietnam, which were big and had quite some
| cultural impact, are more and more forgotten.
| jefftk wrote:
| If someone just says "The Gulf War" they almost always
| mean the 1990-1991 invasion of Iraq ("Desert Storm"):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
| antod wrote:
| Although during the 80s and until Desert Storm, the same
| term was applied to the Iran/Iraq war - which is another
| mostly forgotten thing despite the huge human cost.
|
| (I realised after I typed the above that the wikipedia
| disambiguation page also links to the Iran/Iraq war
| anyway)
| gandalfian wrote:
| Ahem, typo? Site says it was created in 1998. Which
| coincidentally was 25 years ago...
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Yep, typo. At least I got the date-range correct :)
| nr2x wrote:
| Correct, and a good chunk of layoffs were people who never
| got promoted because they were tending the garden. So it's
| actually worse than that, anybody who tried to maintain
| something is marked for deletion by Ruth's fire-a-tron
| eklitzke wrote:
| I don't think it is necessarily a "problem" that it can't be
| perf-farmed anymore though. Google groups isn't perfect but
| it does a lot of things well (the bugs mentioned in TFA not
| withstanding), is used extensively internally at Google, and
| doesn't necessarily need a lot of new features. There are a
| ton of internal products at Google that are also staffed by
| one or two people in maintenance mode and it's not a problem.
|
| As an example, I recently checked the internal symbolization
| service at Google (that handles symbolization for C++
| executables, which is in turn used for generating performance
| profiles and symbolizing things like stack traces generated
| by core dumps) and the team maintaining it was two people.
| And those people aren't solely maintaining the symbolization
| service, they're compiler engineers who spend most of their
| time working on other projects and spend a small amount of
| their time maintaining the symbolization service as issues
| come up or bugs are reported. But this isn't a problem. The
| symbolization service works and is basically feature
| complete. There's no reason to have a team of ten people
| actively working on it.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > the team maintaining it was two people. [...] But this
| isn't a problem. The symbolization service works and is
| basically feature complete.
|
| As long as it works, it is no problem. But given any larger
| change somewhere in the stack and management not being
| aware that these two folks have that side project, maybe
| they even left, and there will be problems.
|
| Either a project has dedicated staff or it doesn't exist
| and just survives.
|
| I don't know how critical groups internally are, but I
| assume with the general decline of e-mail compared to chat,
| video calls, etc. (insert joke about googles chat tools if
| you like ...) I would assume that this will be home less of
| relevance. Over time as well and drop more and more off.
| nr2x wrote:
| "Not a problem"...until they get laid off. Which has
| happened to many internal maintainers.
| brabel wrote:
| > first created in 1988, or 25 years ago
|
| 1988 was 35 years ago. I know, hard to believe... want to
| know something even more shocking?? People who are today 18
| years old were born in 2005!
| Aeolun wrote:
| > People who are today 18 years old were born in 2005!
|
| That's absurd. I'm only 35 years old. 2005 can't be _that_
| long ago.
|
| _checks_
|
| Damn...
| [deleted]
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Yeah, typo. I meant to put 1998 - which is 25 years ago :)
| mybhslaptop wrote:
| It's hard for even me to believe that I'll be turning 18 in
| a few months. All the responsibilities...
| Aeolun wrote:
| Responsibilities are relative. I very much enjoyed that
| -barring lack of money- I could just pick up and go
| anywhere any time I wanted.
| logifail wrote:
| > I'll be turning 18 in a few months. All the
| responsibilities [..]
|
| <chuckle> (sorry!)
|
| ... but, like most soon-to-be-18-year-olds, you have no
| idea![0]
|
| 18 is nothing, but do try and enjoy it while you can :)
|
| [0] just like me, way back when...
| maxwell wrote:
| I remember the feeling, back in 2005...
| golergka wrote:
| > Google Groups has survived 22 years. How many self-hosted
| Discourse forums can say the same?
|
| Initial release August 26, 2014 (8 years ago)[1]
|
| [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software))
| bitL wrote:
| Google Groups basically destroyed all Usenet competitors and
| now is going belly up itself, likely taking down a large
| portion of computing history with itself.
| corobo wrote:
| My account at gtaforums.com turned 20 this year, cripes. Site
| itself looks to be 21 years old.
|
| SomethingAwful has been around longer I'm pretty sure too.
| sli wrote:
| Albino Balcksheep turned 24 this past January and is still
| going. Newgrounds will turn 28 this July. Feels like
| yesterday, still.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-
| hosted forum administration and figure out email delivery?
|
| Absolutely not. Which is why it's distressing that Google
| Groups seems to be getting less reliable as a listserv, I don't
| want to do it myself.
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| Yahoo! Groups lasted 19 years.
|
| I co-admin a large group that had to find a new home when it
| was killed off. We went to a third party (groups.io) that
| accepts money in exchange for services.
|
| Will that have longevity? No idea, but it's at least preferable
| to trusting [insert big tech co]'s benevolence in keeping a
| service (that they seemingly don't care about) running.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| FWIW, shroomery.org dates back to at least 1999. Thats about
| 24 years.
| zamnos wrote:
| Money is but one piece to ensure longevity. How many people
| even work at groups.io? What's their business continuity
| plans in case the founder or someone critical to the team
| dies, either due to old age or some sort of tragedy? Or
| becomes tired of running it?
|
| I'm not convinced it's preferable - people get old and tired
| of running a thing, or undergo some big life event that
| changes their priorities, and it's so tiresome to find a
| successor. Groups.io doesn't have the kind of transparency
| for me to trust in its longevity. (I am in a group or two
| hosted there though.)
|
| Meanwhile, large tech can keep something running well past
| the initial creator's interest as waned. Sergey Brin and
| Larry Page left Google 20 years after they founded it, but I
| doubt they've had the same passion for new algorithms to
| improve Internet search for far longer. Despite that, Google
| is going to be around for a long time. Can you say that about
| groups.io? I don't even know who the CEO is or where the
| company is based.
|
| In the case of google groups, the important thing to realize
| is that Google is from an older era of the Internet, when
| people used mailing lists to keep in touch and wrote long
| form posts rather than pictures on Instagram. So dropping
| support for mailing lists simply would not work with the
| current company culture, and something deep ingrained into a
| company's culture is difficult to change, especially as new
| employess get steeped into that culture.
|
| I'm not going to deny the idea that Google Groups it's been
| "left to die", but I'd expect to see a facelift and a upgrade
| to Google Groups long before it dies, simply because it's an
| important dogfood product.
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| Groups.io was founded by Mark Fletcher[0], who in '97
| started the mailing list service that Yahoo! eventually
| bought and turned into their Groups product. They're about
| 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1].
| Nonetheless, they're small and one might guess there's a
| high bus factor here. (Sorry Mark!)
|
| I think it's a toss up either way. I hadn't seen talk of
| Google Groups being internally significant until this
| thread, but they've burned enough similar products that it
| was barely a consideration for me.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fletcher_(businessman)
|
| [1] https://groups.io/g/updates/topics
| trvz wrote:
| > They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly
| changelogs and updates[1].
|
| This isn't quite the brag you think it is.
|
| 10 years in, a product like this should be mostly fleshed
| out. On the linked page, I'm seeing design as well as
| technical changes mentioned. Also, they apparently only
| started working on translations recently.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. Once you accept
| that, your perspective on 10 years may change. It's a
| long time. I challenge anyone to find discussions of this
| type from 100 years ago. Even if it was recorded
| (unlikely), did it survive after all of the participants
| died (unlikely)? Yes, we have 100 year old newspapers,
| but 100 year old discussions about underwater knitting.
| nr2x wrote:
| Give me a break, long time Googlers use the most shit tools
| just because it's in house. Google Chat is trash compared
| to Slack.
| mrobins wrote:
| In theory, a good _independent_ product with an active user
| base and a profitable model has a better than average
| chance of surviving (bus factor aside).
|
| Should the creator want to move on, someone should find the
| revenue stream attractive for some (even small) amount of
| money.
|
| I'd bet on baseline profitability to keep something alive
| over an outsized dream of future growth or potential
| synergies almost every time.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The Straight Dope has threads on their forum (which at some
| point switched to Discourse) from 1999. So given that you
| consistently have access to your own data I don't see why a
| dedicated webmaster couldn't keep a forum active for a
| significantly longer time than you can trust Google to keep any
| product alive.
|
| Is it possible to export data from Google Groups? If not then
| longevity isn't the right question, they will not keep it
| active forever.
| [deleted]
| bbarn wrote:
| Not only that, but people continue to evolve the way they have
| (no pun intended) discourse. Email used to be the thing
| professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each
| other. I now use email effectively only for delivery
| confirmations and log in verifications. I haven't had a
| personal email in over a year I'd guess. People text, they
| whatsapp, they messenger, they telegram, but no one emails. The
| same with groups. A forum I have been on for decades has
| recently started a poll with the admins and power users of
| "Should we just close the forum since all the good stuff is on
| discord anyway".
|
| Look at Slack's organic growth - it was great, people just
| started it and basically forced adoption on companies. Not so
| much today, because things evolved again. Discord is doing the
| same - people just start one, doesn't have to be official, then
| ultimately, it becomes official.
|
| But you know, if your FOSS community can only survive with one
| specific tool, is it really a community?
| pbreit wrote:
| The "new" web UI is positively awful. The messages list is
| unreadable.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Arstechnica forums have been going on since 98 or so. But they
| had that Conde Nast money early on.
|
| What drives me bonkers is when newspapers just wipe out their
| historical comments sections. Like... archiving people's
| thoughts is supposed to be what you do!
| webtv-user wrote:
| Thoughts...
|
| That is a generous term to describe what you'd find in
| newspaper sites' comment sections!
| logifail wrote:
| > Google Groups has survived 22 years [..]
|
| Well that prompted me to check, and it seems my primary domain
| name, and hence my email address[es], turn 23 years old this
| year!
|
| Hat tip to the person who prompted me - waaay back in 2000 - to
| register it.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I've had mine since 2007, which still feels like a long time
| to me. I was so young then ...
| vasco wrote:
| I wish Discourse never happened to the internet. What a
| regression from phpbb in so many respects when that's the thing
| they set out to improve.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I mean, it seemed objectively great when I heard about it for
| the first time, but then actually using it feels so icky that
| I'm deliberately looking for alternatives.
| madmax108 wrote:
| It's honestly scary for some of these old-school Google products
| that have become vast stores of knowledge.
|
| Besides Google Groups, I worry a lot about the future of
| Blogger/Blogspot. I personally have a blog that I have maintained
| from 2007-08 and I often worry about Google just wiping off a
| part of my internet presence (my own little corner of the web).
| Google has pretty much left Blogspot to die for better half of
| the last decade.
|
| And speaking unselfishly, I often find blogger/blogspot blogs on
| obscure tech topics (usually with the default blogspot template)
| and I worry how much info we'll just lose to the void if/when
| Google decides to pull the plug (even with a grace-period, I'm
| sure most folks wouldn't bother to move this data).
|
| Really shows the value of archival services on the internet and
| why we need to ensure they can function over time!
| bushbaba wrote:
| Better it's left up than killed off.
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