Wouldn't this be a valid use case for web3? As a decentralized group will exist as long as there are active nodes(users?), no need to depend on the goodwill of 1 sole host.
Google Groups has been left to die
301–307 of 307 posts
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#302Google 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…
Honestly usually a forum dies because the community itself died first and no one cares about the thing anymore. Google Groups may have lasted this long but as far as I’m concerned, it already died long ago and there was no reason to even go to it anymore. There are still forums that out there that have survived two decades or more because their community is still alive. And keeping a community alive is not a technica…
Here is not the group dying, but the underlying platform that is dying because its maintainer (Google) lost interest in the business.
So the active groups that are left there need to move to somewhere new (and risk losing all their data/history in the process)
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's just bozo filters with a side of Web of Trust. It's been done. Bozo filters help with spam on the client side but don't do anything about spam on the server side. Servers still have to host everything because they can't know a priori what clients will want or not. Not that your idea is necessarily bad but it breaks a lot of the utility of Usenet to have whitelist based filtering. I can't know ahead of time I l…
Is spam message a problem if noone reads it? Storage is cheap.
As for knowing a guy... Maybe someone will browse spam and vouch for you for this message and if more people like it, you are accepted to their whitelists. But to be honest, if people don't want to read my messages, that is their prerogative.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#304Google 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…
Seems like astonishingly bad engineering.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because freedom is moderation. A place without moderation turns into a spam, gore, cp, racist, sexist shithole where no discourse happens. You may be nostalgic for usenets groups but that was a different time when a very small slice of society used those.
Perhaps the problem was bringing all of society online.
100% this. It's too big now, and we need an alt net which is too technical and difficult for normal people, like in the 90s.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#306Has anyone looked at modernizing NNTP in the past decade?
What new features does it need? And I think make it in the last three decades.
Expectations have changed a bit over the years. People want to be able to apply more formatting to text, incorporate images, videos, emojis etc. If you look at Slack I think you get some idea about what I'm on about. Especially with respect to embedded media.
You can, of course, do all that with HTML, but just using raw HTML posted directly from clients would result in too much chaos (and security challenges). Perhaps a somewhat constrained HTML that doesn't include styling so that styling is primarily done at the newsgroup level and can be overridden in the client? I'd probably prefer going with something simpler. Like Markdown.
Perhaps something could be done about how you quote parts of other postings. So you have markup for quoting text (that refers to a section of a posting).
Now, these things aren't stricly NNTP specific, but about content. But they would be easier to implement if you had some machinery for handling binary content, quoting content etc. in NNTP.
The idea of a single USENET isn't really viable anymore, so you'd have to think about how you can make something similar which is distributed in nature. Some of this is down to creating better clients that can deal with, for instance, you reading 100 forums spread across 20 servers without a lot of silly management. Another thing that would be interesting is to be able to quote content from or refer to postings residing on other servers than the one you are posting to.
Then there's identity, encryption and all that jazz. The simplest way to solve identity is to just use whatever providers people already use (FAANG). But you could perhaps investigate other ways to solve identity. Especially if you want to support various degrees of anonymity.
(Then there's stuff like content moderation, the ability to modify and version postings etc etc)
I think the most challenging bit is to create good clients.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
What new features does it need? And I think make it in the last three decades.
Expectations have changed a bit over the years. People want to be able to apply more formatting to text, incorporate images, videos, emojis etc. If you look at Slack I think you get some idea about what I'm on about. Especially with respect to embedded media. You can, of course, do all that with HTML, but just using raw HTML posted directly from clients would result in too much chaos (and security challenges). Perhap…
Here we are on a text only board - how is that changing expectations.
Quoting parts of older posing is one of the strengths of NNTP clients, they all to it in a common way.
A single USENET was one of the great benefits I don't like going to many different places to get information. I would not that good clients could deal with multiple servers and for us techies things like leafnode made multiple servers easy.
Altering things after posting is a nasty thing - how often do people take snapshots of Twitter so when it is deleted then you can show what someone had done nefariously,