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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

#171

Post by Pxtl »

mschuster91 wrote: post #131
Pxtl wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyb…

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#173

Post by delfinom »

davidw wrote: post #138
em-bee wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#174

Post by mpakes »

lucumo wrote: post #124
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, 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. :)

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#175

Post by bloppe »

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#176

Post by jks »

lelandfe wrote: post #97
gtirloni wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#177

Post by mrobins »

zamnos wrote: post #148
ryanwhitney wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tires…

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#178

Post by amf12 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #108
blahblah1234567 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between products that google started and killed and products that google bought and killed. The former can be a sign of healthy experimentation. The latter is just frustrating, particularly when Google paid a lot for the product in question. Groups at least partly came out of the Dejanews acquisition and seeing something purchased by a company that will be a poor st…

> My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between products that google started and killed and products that google bought and killed.

Or products that were merged in other products [1], or which had newer versions [2].

[1] Google Bookmarks, Password Checkup Extension -> Chrome, etc. [2]: Nest Hub, Nexus Phones, OnHub.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#179

Post by LegitShady »

livrem wrote: post #160
LegitShady wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Di…

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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#180

Post by corobo »

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…

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.

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