Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

The writing has been on the wall for years. I use Yahoo Groups for several local community organizations and features would just randomly break for weeks at a time. There was zero support from Yahoo; it's obvious they no longer had any engineering resources assigned.

Is Google Groups the only practical alternative now? (Some people don't have Facebook accounts so that's not an option.)

View on HN

Or just an email list Depending on your needs. Though SPAM has made that harder without a real commercial service.

We also need file hosting and calendars in a single integrated service so an email list doesn't meet our needs.

Yes, the anti-SPAM efforts have made running your own Mailman (or other list service) instance an increasing pain. Many providers now silently drop list email, even if you have jumped through all the approrpiate hoops.

Spam isn't really a problem for email lists you have to sign up for unless you have a really large number of subscribers. Spammers need zillions of addresses to make it worth their while to do anything.

It isn't a problem at all for closed lists...

Google Groups isn't available in all markets (e.g., China).

There are some other alternatives like groups.io. This is nice for some open source projects that want to have people all over the globe use it.

Thanks for the recommendation, Groups.io looks like a nice alternative.

meetup.com is charging a fee, yahoo group is closing, google group is restricted in certain areas, thanks for mentioning groups.io

we need a low-cost or free alternative to online groups and event meetup, that is not instant-messenger-alike(facebook,slack,etc)

The issue is mostly not the availability of often free software or even the cost of hosting—especially for non-video content. Video isn’t really a big problem either unless it goes viral.

But you lose the discoverability and network effects of a centralized service.

It'd be interesting if there was a discovery service, compatible with all open source community software out there.

So one could search for local communities, like at Meetup.com or Facebook, and topics like "running" etc to find local running group communities?

Any thoughts about how to make that happen?

Look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21259267

> "Building another event organization platform isn't the solution" > "open-source aggregation [of different event feeds]"

I’m not sure how much of a difference there is between centralization and aggregation. Especially if it’s not just a read-only feed.

You can basically aggregate tomorrow with RSS.

Doing that for oneself is pretty simple I would think,

and doing this for other people, so they find what they are interested in, in cities far a way or in other countries, is pretty hard, I think.

That was pretty much my point. Aggregation is technically simple. Creating a locations that's the go-to for people running and planning events is much harder because it's basically a network effects problem.

I'm trying to create a Pay-what-you-want alternative to Meetup and Facebook Events,

https://www.talkyard.io/-267/add-a-way-to-create-events-with...

It's an open source cross between StackOverflow, Slack, HackerNews ... and soon, I hope, enough features from Meetup.com to be an ok replacement. (I'd like to create my own event communities, using this, ... e.g. a co-working at a café group, and sketching group etc)

Build an NNTP server. Works great, easy to use, easy to backup, little resources, many web frontends available, even better used with a proper Usenet reader.

What are the features that make something like Yahoo! Groups so appealing? Is it just inertia? Genuinely curious, given the recent spate of group-based service shutdowns (Meetup going paid, Google Bulletin Board shutting down, now Yahoo).

I guess I don't really understand why something more modern like a subreddit or even an old-fashioned mailing list couldn't take its place.

Yahoo Groups is a mailing list!

Yahoo Groups was great (when it worked) because it wasn't just an email list. It also had file storage and a group calendar with notifications. Having all those services on a single site made usage and administration easy, even for non-technical people.

* blatant plug *

I run Gaggle Mail (https://gaggle.email) which does paid group email (free for groups of less than 20).

It’s really aimed at non-technical folk so not really the HN crowd but thought I’d mention it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com