Looming Groupocalypse: The Google Groupsspaggheddon Cometh

The source code is here: https://gitlab.com/rslight-public/rocksolid-light

The live demo site is here: https://news.novabbs.org/rocksolid/index.php

It has a retro look on purpose. There are several themes included and it is really easy to create a new theme CSS file.

You can run a peer to carry text groups on a raspberry pi or a cheap VPS. Visit the rocksolid.* hierarchy on Usenet if you have questions about running a peer. Please don't ask questions about Rocksolid here on HN, as that would not benefit the people learning in the newsgroups.

Disclosure: I am not the maintainer of Rocksolid Light and I am not promoting my own product. I just like the software and I think the maintainer has the right ideas and right attitude of retro-styled usability in his project.

> And one thing is sure: If September is eternal, then Usenet is eternal, too.

Amazing. Love this.

So email, if you sent mail to topics rather than to recipients.

It was big in the 90s. Well, 'big'. Before we had forums. You can think of it like public email. You got access through a usenet server, often provided by your ISP or University, and it had groups for more or less everything going. Servers would peer the data between them, though server admins would often have a whitelist of groups that they would replicate.

Images were transferred on it much like embedded email images now - as uuencoded text. Base64 probably came in at some point, but you get the picture. There wasn't a lot in the way of video back then, few people had the bandwidth.

Groups had etiquette but I'm not sure how/if it could be enforced. The ultimate sanction was to put someone in your ignore file, and then you wouldn't see them any more.

Old usenet was largely inhabited by tech enthusiasts, students and academics. It is the place where flame-wars and trolling originated.

Two things killed the old usenet experience.

First there was the tradition of people who didn't know the etiquette flooding in every September with the new academic year. They would learn and participate better and settle in over a short while and order would be restored. When AOL gave newsgroup access, it was referred to as the September that never ended, and marked a downturn in the quality of discussion.

Second was spammers figuring out they could just flood the place, and so the merrily did, until it was basically useless and impossible to find actual conversation.

> It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents

Yeah so in the old binaries groups you could split videos over huge numbers of individual messages, tied together with identifiers in the titles, then reconstruct them. By the mid 00s this seemed to be the main use of usenet.

A file containing all of the message ids for a particular binary was called an 'nzb' and you could use that to grab the binary if you had a newsgroup server subscription and a program like sabnzbd. By that point most ISPs didn't give access to usenet any more, so you went through a third party. You could run a sort of trawler thing on groups you liked to build nzbs yourself, which used a lot of time and data, or you could subscribe to an nzb service. These survived for a while because a) fewer people used them and b) they made the same arguments as trackers - there's no content here, it's just an index.

'scene' videos would often get to usenet first, in fact usenet was often the source of the binaries which then made their way to the torrent services AFAICT.

For the casual consumer of pirated material it was probably legally safer than torrenting as you never uploaded anything.

Back in the day ISPs would give you an email account, some static web space accessible via FTP and access to the local NNTP (usenet) server as standard, which is why it was popular. usenet servers were peered with each other, sharing a large global namespace (servers could have local-only groups too, but that's a detail).

At the beginning, most of the online discussions happened there.

As open-source development grew, the main issue was that creating and getting approval for a group was bureaucratic/complicated and slow. As this was global and automatically peered, there was also a "minimum" number of requests to be eligible. For this reason, small groups started to move to mailing lists instead which didn't require special approval and became the new de-facto standard.

For a long time, bi-directional nntp<>mailing list software was standard for large lists. nntp clients were always designed to work with huge amount of messages efficiently compared to mail clients. I was following hundreds of groups at the time, and I still consider nntp fantastic from the user perspective.

Spam and trolls were another problem with such a public global network. Policing was hard. This is just a very short summary (it ignores completely the problem of piracy/warez and the binary split..)

You can enjoy threaded discussion in unmoderated groups without worrying about viewpoint censorship.

You can run your own NNTP peer and create your own newsgroups for your own community.

You can use a threaded newsreader application (like Thunderbird or Seamonkey or Claws Mail) which is much more efficient and organized than web forums.

> ... but I’ve got no idea what Usenet is.

You can start exploring Usenet here: https://news.novabbs.org

>Viewing and searching of historical data will still be supported as it is done today.

Disclosure: I work at Google (or at least I hope I still do), but not on this.

Those archives are often searchable on their own platforms, and are indexed by regular search engines too.

Now about mailing lists created using the google "groups" platform itself, is a different story. Does google index it's own group archives? No idea. Those were _already_ horrible to look at before and I've subscribed most of the ones I follow to other public archives to get something usable.

Public/centralized archives as the sibling notes became common at some point, though usability is generally worse than with an email client (at least the power-user ones).