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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

#131

Post by mschuster91 »

Pxtl wrote: post #118
mschuster91 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wor…

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…

> 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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#132

Post by p41nt »

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?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#133

Post by Animats »

pwg wrote: post #129
Animats wrote: post #119

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#135

Post by chx »

bpye wrote: post #42
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…

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?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#136

Post by micromacrofoot »

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…

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#137

Post by em-bee »

davidw wrote: post #29

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 th…

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#138

Post by davidw »

em-bee wrote: post #137
davidw wrote: post #29

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 th…

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?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#139

Post by eitally »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #85
scottfr wrote: post #44

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…

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.

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