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Google Groups has been left to die

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Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#261

Post by MonaroVXR »

radiojasper wrote: post #260
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…

> or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and figure out email delivery? Nah, I'd just use Discord. Code rendering: check. With different syntax highlighting per language even. Discussion: check. Forums: check. Photo galleries: check. Email notifications: check. Free: check.

But not searchable on internet

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#262

Post by astrostl »

scrollaway wrote: post #225
astrostl wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't remember many people being upset about Google stepping in I don't remember any former/active usenet user not being upset! Specifically because Deja had a full archive and robust search, and it was expected that the service would be Googlified into oblivion. Which happened, and even faster than the biggest doomsayers predicted.

In 2001? "Googlified"??? Do you even realize this was Google's first acquisition ? Either you're making things up, or you are rewriting history as GP said.

Yes, Googlified - it was not resurrected and operated separately as-was, but immediately stuffed into Google Groups. I and many others considered Google Groups to be vastly worse than Deja News. I even found this subthread because my first instinct was to CMD-F and search for 'deja' when I saw a Groups-related discussion was happening.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#263

Post by chris_wot »

zamnos wrote: post #167
mrguyorama wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol what? Wikipedia has EXTREME moderation, from locking contentious articles, to hyper nerds spending all their free time browsing edit histories to revert dumb changes middle school kids made, to active efforts to undo the work that literal nation-state actors have done, to having to ban the offices of American politicians and political contractors who OFFER SERVICES TO REMOVE YOUR CONTENT FROM WIKIPEDIA It hasn't…

I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah, you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able to write effectively about electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield, Ohio, and want to add things to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailme…

Except you can’t. That stuff will often get reverted summarily. There are a group of abusive admins who will defend certain editors no matter how awful they are.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#264

Post by chris_wot »

mschuster91 wrote: post #161
dalbasal wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The variety…

> First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Islamist content gets rigorously moderated on all networks you mention, for years now. The far-right was similarly acted against, but at least in the case of Twitter Musk reversed a lot of their bans, with the expected result of people spreading Nazi vocabulary or Holocaust denialism right after…

It’s not the tech staff who are the problem. It’s the toxic community.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#265

Post by sn_master »

guiambros wrote: post #246
sn_master wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, don't Google emails by default have a 6 months expiry and the Groups is a way to preserve knowledge instead of relying on emails?

By default there's no Gmail expiration (that I know of). Deleted messages are kept in the Trash folder for 30 days and then permanently deleted, but archived emails exist forever (provided you still have space left).

I was talking about the Google internal Gmail, not the public Gmail. I am sure that one has a default expiry for normal emails at least. Did you try checking your inbox for anything > 6 months old?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#266

Post by xtracto »

superkuh wrote: post #106
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…

Usenet still exists and is actually getting better with time. There's not much spam and the only people there left are geeks that care about the topic. The eternal september is over and it's time to start again. You can get text only access for your usenet client (or use a web interface) at https://www.eternal-september.org/ . I post on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk every now and then and get decent conversations. I…

Thanks for this. I was a heavy NNTP user back in the early 90s and will have a look at your recommendations.

I've got a lot of spare disk space ,(several TB)... maybe I could setup a mirror. Also, with current BTRFS compression, it should be possible to achieve good ratios for text files.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#268

Post by BlueTemplar »

Aeolun wrote: post #251
vasco wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Discourse never happened to the internet. What a regression from phpbb in so many respects when that's the thing they set out to improve.

I mean, it seemed objectively great when I heard about it for the first time, but then actually using it feels so icky that I’m deliberately looking for alternatives.

Yeah, so why is that ? I'm not using it much, IIRC one issue is that it doesn't work if JavaScript is disabled, right ?

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#269

Post by evouga »

bbarn wrote: post #221
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…

Not only that, but people continue to evolve the way they have (no pun intended) discourse. Email used to be the thing professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each other. I now use email effectively only for delivery confirmations and log in verifications. I haven't had a personal email in over a year I'd guess. People text, they whatsapp, they messenger, they telegram, but no one emails. The same…

“no one emails”: that hasn’t been my experience or observation at all. Email remains by far the most common channel for professional communication.

Sure, my coworkers will send me Slack DMs. Random professional acquaintances do not.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#270

Post by BlueTemplar »

mschuster91 wrote: post #95
dalbasal wrote: post #60

Looking back, it's quite surprising how stagnant, in some sense, the social media space has become. How centralised and how... lame. The big hitters really did pillage and burn. Now, between moderation norms becoming increasingly sensitive and the hard turn the web took away from open... It's hard to see any new form take off. That said, perhaps that means it's a perfect time. Groups/Usenet has its limitations. Featu…

> There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again? Because any kind of social media, especially when it allows binary assets, will be abused by CSAM and piracy spreaders, by Holocaust deniers, by scammers, by spammers shilling dick enlargement pills, questionably "legal" drugs, questionable dietary supplements or all kinds of other stuff, by trolls bullying people right up to suicide "for the lulz", o…

Mastodon is social media, not a platform, and Gab (or Truth social), despite being bigger than all the other of its servers, haven't managed to "overrun" it.
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