Google Groups has been left to die | Hacker News Reader

Google Groups has been left to die

ahelwer.ca

507 pointsahelwer294 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

> High bus factor

You mean "he might get hit by a bus"? Surely businesses die more easily than people. Isn't a "high bus factor" kind of a good thing in this situation?

> 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.

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.

Scientific journals were basically the mailing lists of their time, especially when they first started. You can easily find journals from 100s of years ago.

In my local library I have compilations of letters an dispatches from over 150 years ago.

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.

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

- Benjamin Brewster, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/04/14/theory/

I'm a normal enough person and so I can get good at most things. But, it'll take a few tries to get good at it. Riding a bike, swimming, SATs, etc. The first time I rode a bike was a disaster. I hurt myself and fell off. But I got back on and built up my bike balancing skills and, well, now I can ride a bike without falling off.

Soft skills, like managing people, are just like that. Another skillset to build, with practice, just like in an RPG. But one thing that I've never had to do before is find a successor to own my business. It's just not a muscle I've ever used. Nor, I bet, have many other people. So when Mark Fletcher, who seems like he's held this since before the Yahoo times, decides he's had enough and wants to retire, is he going to have a well practiced "find a successor" muscle? or is he going to fall off the bike, disastrously? Because the other thing about riding a bike is that you can read all the books, listen to all the podcasts about it, but that all pales in comparison to actually riding a bike and practicing.

You know who does have experience with replacing people like they're cogs in a machine though and nominating successor? Giant machines aka Google in this context.

So to each their own. I'm going to bet on dogfood keeping the dog alive until the owner decides it doesn't love the dog called Google Groups any more. I'm still very sad about Google Reader being put out to pasture and more recently Stadia, but lovable the German Shepard of a dog that is Search won't stop getting love from it's owner Alphabet and neither will Keep.

My problem is that the bus factor can't be put aside when it's such a small number, and that pile of "should"s add up to just as much, if not more, uncertainty, compared to Google letting groups living on in a half zombified state essentially forever. At the very least, you have to admit that once you put some thought into it, it's not as cut and dried as "boo hoo Google killed off Reader in 2011 and I'm still salty about it" (which, tbc, I am.)

google kinda has a track record here

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.

>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.

Irony / wheel coming full circle, sort of:

Follow the links about M&A and founders in the links below.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroups

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONElist

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fletcher_(businessman)

https://groups.io/

https://wingedpig.com/about/

Edit: okay, I didn't see this post by ryanwhitney before I first posted this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073095

I saw it only after.

Anyway, I knew about this history because I had a Yahoo! Groups account before it was that, i.e. was either eGroups or OneList, had been following Mark Fletcher, and had a groups.io account too, and had read his blog from long back.

FWIW, shroomery.org dates back to at least 1999. Thats about 24 years.

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

> 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!

Yeah, typo. I meant to put 1998 - which is 25 years ago :)

I’m pretty sure 1998 is only 15 years ago. I asked Bing and it agrees with me.

> 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…

It's hard for even me to believe that I'll be turning 18 in a few months. All the responsibilities...

> 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...

Responsibilities are relative. I very much enjoyed that -barring lack of money- I could just pick up and go anywhere any time I wanted.

I remember the feeling, back in 2005...

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.

> 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.

“Not a problem”…until they get laid off. Which has happened to many internal maintainers.

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

Ahem, typo? Site says it was created in 1998. Which coincidentally was 25 years ago...

Yep, typo. At least I got the date-range correct :)

Just a note that 1988 was, gulp, 35 years ago.

Just a note, Star Wars was released closer to World War 2, than today's date.

Makes you feel really old.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

perf-farm ? I think I might know what you mean, but could you unpack?

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.

> 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.

When you get promoted, they tend to move you to different projects (that need different resources at founding time than the operations folks that have experience scaling up)

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, so why is that ? I'm not using it much, IIRC one issue is that it doesn't work if JavaScript is disabled, right ?

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.

The warezers killed usenet. They made it completely uneconomical for ISPs to run server.

Usenet was generally pretty good at sticking to binaries for the warez and copyright content. Hosting the text-only groups was not that intensive, especially by today's standards. I think the worst problem was sites that just didn't care... I spent a day reporting spam posts to the admins of origin servers, and they just didn't care at all.

Today, it's far less of an issue.. but if Usenet got popular again, the spammers would get back into it. I can only imagine how much spam gets removed/filtered on this site.

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.

Because it requires a dedicated webmaster.

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?

“no one emails”: that hasn’t been my experience or observation at all. Email remains by far the most common channel for professional communication.

Sure, my coworkers will send me Slack DMs. Random professional acquaintances do not.

To me, email is still the killer app. It upsets me that it is losing its power as an open protocol as corporations try to cannibalize it.

> 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.

Be careful with extrapolating from you personal experience. Pretty much all of my professional communication happens over e-mail. (I wouldn't even know what to use instead.) I am sure that is still true for many people.

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.

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.

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.

https://offtopic.com/ is still going and I believe it started in 2000?

Honestly usually a forum dies because the community itself died first and no one cares about the thing anymore.

Google Groups may have lasted this long but as far as I’m concerned, it already died long ago and there was no reason to even go to it anymore.

There are still forums that out there that have survived two decades or more because their community is still alive. And keeping a community alive is not a technical matter.

Here is not the group dying, but the underlying platform that is dying because its maintainer (Google) lost interest in the business.

So the active groups that are left there need to move to somewhere new (and risk losing all their data/history in the process)

> 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.

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!

Thoughts…

That is a generous term to describe what you'd find in newspaper sites' comment sections!

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.

Albino Balcksheep turned 24 this past January and is still going. Newgrounds will turn 28 this July. Feels like yesterday, still.

Right! I remember clearly when I registered on GTAF too. I'd discovered a bug/trick that allowed you to store a helicopter in a garage (I want to say in GTA 3?) and was itching to tell someone about it.

Of course it was already a known thing on the internet, but that was the start of my online career. From there I ended up on IRC and in there I wanted to make a bot, so I learned mIRCScript.

Spin on a couple years and I was helping run the IRC network, which got me into sysadmin stuff. From that rattling off how email works got me my first real tech job. "How in-depth do you want me to go?" "Uhh.. as far as you can"

I got the job offer before I'd finished with the DNS lookups haha.

The "new" web UI is positively awful. The messages list is unreadable.

> 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))

> 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.

I've had mine since 2007, which still feels like a long time to me. I was so young then ...

> or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and figure out email delivery?

Nah, I'd just use Discord. Code rendering: check. With different syntax highlighting per language even. Discussion: check. Forums: check. Photo galleries: check. Email notifications: check. Free: check.

But not searchable on internet

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.

Yes, Google Groups is used for much more than emails. That's not the point of the article though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think the main part that the article is referring to is the decaying remains of Dejanews specifically and the historically relevant usenet archived therein. That part seems to have no actual maintainer.

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?)

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.

Is that not "Google Groups for Workspaces" vs the newsgroups style public Google Groups this article is talking about?

It's the same thing...

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

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.

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?

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).

I was talking about the Google internal Gmail, not the public Gmail. I am sure that one has a default expiry for normal emails at least. Did you try checking your inbox for anything > 6 months old?

Seems like astonishingly bad engineering.

Simple shared email addresses maybe, but Groups is far from "Shared Gmail" when it comes to even basic features like tagging and archiving.

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

Yes, Googlified - it was not resurrected and operated separately as-was, but immediately stuffed into Google Groups. I and many others considered Google Groups to be vastly worse than Deja News. I even found this subthread because my first instinct was to CMD-F and search for 'deja' when I saw a Groups-related discussion was happening.

Google still had a broadly positive reputation among technical people in 2011, let alone 2001.

Yup, Deja destroyed itself - their interface and IIRC search got much worse before the end.

Google of 2001 is not the Google of 2023. If anything its the exact opposite.

"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.

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

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.

Thanks for mentioning Eternal September [0]! I used their site in the past but had been using http://news.aioe.org [1] up until it went offline [2] possibly due to a disk failure [3], as it seemed more performant than Eternal September. As far as no-cost text-only newsgroup read/write access, I think we are down to Eternal September and possibly the BlueWorld Usenet Farm[4]. Though arguably, if I'm interested in keeping newsgroups alive, perhaps paying for access from a provider such as EasyNews, GigaNews, etc. [5].

[0] https://www.eternal-september.org/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221220194002/http://news.aioe....

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/10m9n22/aioe_gone/

[3] https://groups.google.com/g/eternal-september.support/c/Elen...

[4] https://usenet.blueworldhosting.com/

[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Usenet_Providers_and...

Thanks for this. I was a heavy NNTP user back in the early 90s and will have a look at your recommendations.

I've got a lot of spare disk space ,(several TB)... maybe I could setup a mirror. Also, with current BTRFS compression, it should be possible to achieve good ratios for text files.

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....

alt.folklore computers

comp.unix*

comp.misc

comp.lang.*

comp.infosystems.gemini

comp.infosystems.gopher

And if you want to see idiots fighting, comp.os.linux.advocacy

I prefer FIDO and DoveNet for productive talks on casual OS discussions.

I like DoveNet quite a bit... fsx is decent as well. Haven't really looked at any others recently.

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.

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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. :)

If Google Groups is actually going to die would it not be worth scraping the history for at least some groups?

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?

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

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.

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?

> 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...

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.

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.

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!

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.

Except you can’t. That stuff will often get reverted summarily. There are a group of abusive admins who will defend certain editors no matter how awful they are.

Look at the forest.

Sure. It's an encyclopedia. It's heavily edited. Sometimes it's conflucted. There are cliques. Etc.

But.. they produce an encyclopedia. It's actually free. It's transparent. It's very high quality.

It's a working system. Whatever the fairness grievances people have with "censorship," on Wikipedia, they are nowhere near as bad as they are on any commery platform.

Yet... whether it's Wikipedia's finances, moderation or anything... Wikipedia attract more need rage than any of them.

Imo, this is the biggest barrier to freedom online. Freedom and transparency make people insanely critical and hostile.

Well, if it can’t be improved then it is stagnating at best, and degrading at worst. And it is definitely degrading.

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.

> 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.

It’s not the tech staff who are the problem. It’s the toxic community.

Dear god, you can’t use Wikipedia. The abusive moderation is incredible on that site. Not a project I’d ever recommend contributing to!

Mastodon is social media, not a platform, and Gab (or Truth social), despite being bigger than all the other of its servers, haven't managed to "overrun" it.

>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?

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".

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.

> 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.

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....

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.

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.

Yeah, considering Antifa has a (pre)history of Stalinism and alliances of convenience with Nazis, I don't see what is there to be proud of ?

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!

Because freedom is moderation. A place without moderation turns into a spam, gore, cp, racist, sexist shithole where no discourse happens. You may be nostalgic for usenets groups but that was a different time when a very small slice of society used those.

Perhaps the problem was bringing all of society online.

100% this. It's too big now, and we need an alt net which is too technical and difficult for normal people, like in the 90s.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

Ironically, in recent experience I've found Google Groups email routed to spam in Gmail, even with a Gmail-based sender and recipient.

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".

> 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!

The problem with USENET is spam. Moderation can be a burden. I suppose Google has some systems in place to mitigate this.

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.

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.

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.

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".

> 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).

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.

> 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.

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.

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".

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Well your rate-limit comment raises an interesting point. My thought is that if you allowed back-and-forth conversations on public forums the comment sections would become uncomfortably long to get through, which already is kind of a doom-scrolling problem anyway.

Maybe public forums could hold the form of introductory areas that cause new conversations and relationships to shoot off into their own bubbles.

I'm an non-US empirical republican so most of my political views are bland to discuss in an American context. I do believe that more discussion builds better structures and reveals better ideas.

With human moderation, text input that carries meaning to the conversation can be allowed, regardless of it's machine-or-human source. In the big-picture sense, all information is generated by humans, so someone using ChatGPT to parrot old data into hackernews doesn't necessarily spell doom unless it's meaningless spam, like you say.

If we gave up "all" control of our computers an external web authority, you could validate if the user had copy&pasted from ChatGPT. But since we're in this odd middle-area of desiring no oversight on the PC, and high quality filtering on the web service, then you need humans to do the work of interpreting....

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.

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).

Is spam message a problem if noone reads it? Storage is cheap.

As for knowing a guy... Maybe someone will browse spam and vouch for you for this message and if more people like it, you are accepted to their whitelists. But to be honest, if people don't want to read my messages, that is their prerogative.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just like when Google performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver against GOPHER.

Huh? Gopher was dead before google existed.

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!

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.

That person might still be there and they might still be the only one on the product.

Google groups will never die because Google uses it to manage internal mailing lists.

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).

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.

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.

Came here to say this... Google Groups has a ton of use internally.

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.

It's used heavily by many other companies that pay for Google Workspace too.

Yes, another good example HN users sharing in areas where they obviously don't have anything to contribute. That's to say nothing of the original blog post.

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.

This also happens with Google-owned projects. A fair amount of Google Summer of Code communication goes to spam.

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.

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?

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"

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.

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.

https://groups.io is good for mailing lists, yes.

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!

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

It's also blazingly fast. An awesome D app.

> 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.

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.

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.

This is one of many free replacements for google groups. I have been using that for years.

https://www.newsgroupreviews.com/eternal-september.html

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.

Check if your country has public-funded LISTSERV/Mailman/* instances. If not, I'll check https://gaggle.email

Checkout Topicbox by Fastmail... fills the niche perfectly!

Is it for a mailing list or for a website archive? You can self-host a listserv on many shared hosting sites for pennies.

What are the requirements / key features of Google Groups that you use?

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.

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.

> 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

> except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month).

No? Discourse is free like phpBB.

Edit: Wow, they have really hidden the possibility for self-hosting from their website. It's still here, though - https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

Or- great work to Google for maintaining a product that has waned in popularity and not killing it off!

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.

> 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?

If you want IM+videoconference+file transfers (and emojis), Jabber. Public places to discuss stuff, IRC. Decentralized fora, NNTP+TLS.

I'm a huge fan of decentralisation, but I am 100% not going back to IRC. I want the modern features too. Matrix seems to cover this.

I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.

Hackers and spammers too. Famously bad security (which somehow got PHP got blamed for, rather than specific software) principles.

PHP got blamed for because it handed developers guns to shoot themselves in the foot with.

In fairness, early PHP often made it much easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing while simultaneously targeting beginner web developers.

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!

While there are still forums using old software, and more importantly, not moderated, which are overrun by spam, surely this isn't the case for those that keep up ?

(I'm also wondering how much field-specific registration questions help there, and what are the non-GAFAM alternatives to Captcha ?)

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.

Why not Discourse? It has 34% of the discussion market now

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

You're thinking of Discord, not Discourse.

>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?

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.

Can you link to research behind that? I'm really curious how this defines the "discussion" market.

https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/forum-software

Yeah so it's not 34% of the discussion market, it's 34% of the top one million sites that use a discussion platform. The distinction is important, because the top one million sites are likely to be run by corporations as product Q&A platforms, which is very different from what you want from a Google Groups clone.

Oh, that's disappointing, but it answers the question of how the market is defined for the quoted statistic.

Discourse doesn't feel like old, real forums.

phpBB has nicer layout

The article answers that question.

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).

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.

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).

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)

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...

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.

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?

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?

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.

I disagree, Google Groups and Usenet are immortal now that they have been included into LLM training corpuses.

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.

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.

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.

Realtime chat platforms like Matrix necessitate an entirely different sort of moderation compared to a traditional mailing list/forum-style community.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

Usenet/NNTP is the way... Although most text/discussion groups are long dead, I think it's still a good idea in general. The move away from this towards email lists and Google Groups in the first place is/was IMO problematic. Much like moves away from IRC.

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 :)

Better it’s left up than killed off.

Google groups is widely used internally to Google. it isn't going away anytime soon.

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)

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.

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

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.

This is sarcasm right? The answer being SMTP and email.

NNTP?

yup.

How do you add a new group for your new project?

Has anyone looked at modernizing NNTP in the past decade?

What new features does it need?

And I think make it in the last three decades.

Expectations have changed a bit over the years. People want to be able to apply more formatting to text, incorporate images, videos, emojis etc. If you look at Slack I think you get some idea about what I'm on about. Especially with respect to embedded media.

You can, of course, do all that with HTML, but just using raw HTML posted directly from clients would result in too much chaos (and security challenges). Perhaps a somewhat constrained HTML that doesn't include styling so that styling is primarily done at the newsgroup level and can be overridden in the client? I'd probably prefer going with something simpler. Like Markdown.

Perhaps something could be done about how you quote parts of other postings. So you have markup for quoting text (that refers to a section of a posting).

Now, these things aren't stricly NNTP specific, but about content. But they would be easier to implement if you had some machinery for handling binary content, quoting content etc. in NNTP.

The idea of a single USENET isn't really viable anymore, so you'd have to think about how you can make something similar which is distributed in nature. Some of this is down to creating better clients that can deal with, for instance, you reading 100 forums spread across 20 servers without a lot of silly management. Another thing that would be interesting is to be able to quote content from or refer to postings residing on other servers than the one you are posting to.

Then there's identity, encryption and all that jazz. The simplest way to solve identity is to just use whatever providers people already use (FAANG). But you could perhaps investigate other ways to solve identity. Especially if you want to support various degrees of anonymity.

(Then there's stuff like content moderation, the ability to modify and version postings etc etc)

I think the most challenging bit is to create good clients.

Here we are on a text only board - how is that changing expectations.

Quoting parts of older posing is one of the strengths of NNTP clients, they all to it in a common way.

A single USENET was one of the great benefits I don't like going to many different places to get information. I would not that good clients could deal with multiple servers and for us techies things like leafnode made multiple servers easy.

Altering things after posting is a nasty thing - how often do people take snapshots of Twitter so when it is deleted then you can show what someone had done nefariously,

Better it goes untouched than they try to "improve" it like what happened with the YouTube Music migration.

This is where Academia should be jumping in to provide something open and backed with endowment money.

I dread seeing an answer on a google group past about 6pm, since the CSS for dark mode is completely broken…

Does it still gateway to Usenet? Could people just use Usenet without Google?

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).

Maybe all that's needed here is a better USENET client.

slrn it's fine. Killing SPAM it's very easy to do.

I just started using Google Groups and love it. Is it going by the wayside?

Wouldn't this be a valid use case for web3? As a decentralized group will exist as long as there are active nodes(users?), no need to depend on the goodwill of 1 sole host.

Google acts like it's suffering from ADHD.

Nice to see the author created discussion threads on lobste.rs, Hacker News and r/programming

Good!

As an outsider, why wouldn't anyone just migrate this to Slack/Discord/etc?

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.

Slack is prohibitively expensive if you need more than 90 days of history, and Discord isn't very open or great for search.

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