Google Groups ending support for Usenet

Is that the same trick alt.sysadmin.recovery used to use?

Probably. Usenet moderation works on the honor system. There is no standard for verifying who gave an approval and you can usually do it yourself.

I guess one must ask El Reg to write about it. I think that might have been how it got solved a couple years ago when comp.lang.c and others were affected by this [1].

Currently, at least mozilla.support.seamonkey (not a USENET group, but from news.mozilla.org - which was shut down, but whose archived content would certainly be useful) is in that state at Google Groups. And yes, IIRC the only SPAM in recent times in that group had been posted via Google Groups...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/01/google_usenet/

So, that really wasn't the original question, so noting that we've moved on from that ...

Basic protocols such as NNTP and IRC have the benefit of being stable, small (running a Usenet server on an OpenWRT router with additional writeable storage would be doable, running a Fediverse instance not so much), and being relatively client-independent and even protocol-flexible. NNTP SMTP gateways are, for example, A Thing, and people can participate in such newsgroups from either Usenet or email clients. Similarly Web gateways to either NNTP or SMTP systems.

The flipside is that the underlying protocols are also simple and absent some additional tooling lack much of what it is that people have come to expect from more recent messaging systems:

- Mobile device access. That's probably the big one, though I'd argue that for useful discussion you're better off eliminating mobile use. I've commented that losing a keyboard and being forced to a small screen cuts my effective IQ by half, and that quality of discussion on public systems also seems strongly negatively affected by mobile use. Read-only access might be a compromise, with some "I have something to say but will wait until I can access a Real Computer" might be an option. Android + Termux + Bluetooth keyboard meets my minimums as "real computer", FWIW.

- Formatted text, usually a flavour of Markdown or some "smart editor" for normies. Then again, we seem to survive with much less than that on HN.

- Images. That's the principle feature NNTP lacks natively, though they can be shoehorned in via uuencoded posts. Along with audio and video, the ability to create multimedia posts (popular, occasionally useful, terribly abused) might be an objection raised by many.

- Third-party clients. The great strength/weakness of NNTP and SMTP are that neither are locked to a single client, or Web client (though the latter is available). Having a specific tailored client program (tin, slrn, Emacs, pan, etc.) is useful because the features of the platform are strongly supported by those clients. Downside is Yet Another Piece of Software to install and train on. In the mobile world apps have been breaking the notion of everything-in-the-browser, though often bringing along their own set of issues, most notably surveillance, but also general issues of design, UI/UX, maintenance, security, and abandonment.

The initial question addressed could and the answer really is "trivially", from a technical level.

Yours is "should", and as I'd hinted in my initial response, that's far more social and up for debate (as we're doing here).

But at least you're demonstrating a exception to Ian Malcolm's could/should criticism.

The files are compressed mbox format. Anybody who used unix email in the 80s or 90s, before Maildir took over (rightly!) knows what that means, but it's a single text file with all your emails. (or usenet posts in this case).

I've downloaded a few newsgroups that I care about so I can search offline since Google usenet search is not very good.

It is a shame and a huge missed opportunity that archive.org doesn't have a usable usenet browser/searching. I would build it for free. Heck, I would pay them (well, I do donate).