Google Groups has been left to die • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#31

Post by rexreed » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:40 PM UTC

gtk40 wrote: post #2

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.

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

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#32

Post by biorach » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:41 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #25

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 t…

> 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

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#33

Post by nightpool » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#34

Post by SteveMoody73 » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:42 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #20

cauthon wrote: post #3

I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.

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

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#35

Post by troyastorino » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #19

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).

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#36

Post by proser » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

ericand wrote: post #14

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#37

Post by AlbertCory » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#38

Post by LegitShady » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

nightpool wrote: post #33

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 fig…

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#39

Post by golergka » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

nightpool wrote: post #33

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 fig…

> 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))

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#40

Post by bornfreddy » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

haolez wrote: post #17

jdfellow wrote: post #8

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 yo…

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

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.