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Google Groups has been left to die

ahelwer.ca

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Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#61

Post by NelsonMinar »

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…

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".

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#62

Post by coreyp_1 »

scrollaway wrote: post #10
blahblah1234567 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

And anyone who comments on Google-related topics with the link to killedbygoogle is beating a dead horse... So tired of that argument.

Actually, I didn't know about the site, so I'm glad that the comment was posted. It seems like a great resource for project idea prompts that can be taken, modified/customized/generalized/specialized into something new!

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#63

Post by taviso »

throw7 wrote: post #9

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#64

Post by rsync »

jmclnx wrote: post #7

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 th…

"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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#66

Post by floren »

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.

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#67

Post by itamarst »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #49

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…

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

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#68

Post by spacedcowboy »

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…

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

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#69

Post by rob »

LegitShady wrote: post #38
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.

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