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What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

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Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#11

Post by palata »

scottedwards wrote: post #5

I feel your pain. I was lucky enough to be around to enjoy the days when the ONLY place online where people were discussing serious topics (and non-serious ones!) was USENET (and maybe The Well). Google Groups just started to throw a web interface on USENET. Sadly, once big money entered the Web in the late 90's, every Portal popping up felt like they had to include discussions/message boards into their features. Yah…

> After all, what does it mean when 90% of people spend their time on Instagram and Tiktok?

I tend to think that the 10% remaining still represents more users than what USENET ever had. It's okay to not include everybody in a web community; I actually think it's a mistake to try to include everybody. Some people just don't fit (and would fit better somewhere else). Many times I read people saying "in order to attract more people you should do this and that", but I disagree: maybe you don't want to attract the people you wouldn't attract in the current state.

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#12

Post by palata »

I think good communities exist, but it's not necessarily easy to find them. Some comment here mentions USENET, and I think it was from a different time, where there was a very strong filter based on who joins Internet communities (only a specific subset of people were doing that). Now pretty much everyone does. It's probably easy to find a community of Taylor Swift's fans because there are so many, harder to find a niche community.

The hard thing, IMO, is that it's also very hard to promote those communities to the people who would fit. If a community is over-advertised, then many people will join and alter it, maybe destroying it (say you have this nice community of mobile development that talks about Kotlin and Swift, and in a few weeks you get 3000% more users who all love PWAs... it won't be the same community anymore).

One could hope that algorithms would be very good at creating perfect communities of people who match with each other, but it's hard to say from history that social networks are good at that except for a few examples were they actually grouped together people with pretty radical opinions and it was not exactly great.

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#13

Post by jazz_from_hell »

palata wrote: post #10
jazz_from_hell wrote: post #9

In general, the best online conversations I read/participate in take place on Slack.

Do you mean some public communities that you join with a public invitation, or do you mean more private communities (like your company Slack)?

I mainly hang out in two Slack communities, both quite high-volume. The first one is public but regional (not in English), the other one is invite-only but quite big.

For people who want a nice place to hang out online, I can warmly recommend starting a Slack (”tenant”?). I’m kinda surprised that more people don’t try this. Mattermost or Discord might work too, but IMHO Slack still has the best UI for this. (The shortened retention sucks of course, but it’s still very useful.)

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#14

Post by palata »

jazz_from_hell wrote: post #13
palata wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean some public communities that you join with a public invitation, or do you mean more private communities (like your company Slack)?

I mainly hang out in two Slack communities, both quite high-volume. The first one is public but regional (not in English), the other one is invite-only but quite big. For people who want a nice place to hang out online, I can warmly recommend starting a Slack (”tenant”?). I’m kinda surprised that more people don’t try this. Mattermost or Discord might work too, but IMHO Slack still has the best UI for this. (The shor…

My feeling is that Discord is taking over Slack for a simple reason: it's easier for "community contributions".

In Slack, if you want to keep the history (which most people seem to really, really need for some reason I don't get), the owner of the community needs to pay (a lot).

On Discord, the community members seem to be able to make some kind of contributions as a "donation". Not sure exactly how it works, but I have seen a few open source communities move to Discord for this reason.

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#15

Post by jazz_from_hell »

palata wrote: post #14
jazz_from_hell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mainly hang out in two Slack communities, both quite high-volume. The first one is public but regional (not in English), the other one is invite-only but quite big. For people who want a nice place to hang out online, I can warmly recommend starting a Slack (”tenant”?). I’m kinda surprised that more people don’t try this. Mattermost or Discord might work too, but IMHO Slack still has the best UI for this. (The shor…

My feeling is that Discord is taking over Slack for a simple reason: it's easier for "community contributions". In Slack, if you want to keep the history (which most people seem to really, really need for some reason I don't get), the owner of the community needs to pay (a lot). On Discord, the community members seem to be able to make some kind of contributions as a "donation". Not sure exactly how it works, but I h…

Yeah that might be a good selling point for Discord. So far I haven’t really felt at home in Discord’s UI paradigm, but I also haven’t found any ”must-have” communities there either (for my tastes).

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#16

Post by ManlyBread »

davkan wrote: post #8
al_borland wrote: post #7

When I was in college it was all about forums. I belonged to many, and it was my favorite era of the internet. There were people I talked to everyday for a decade, and formed many real life friendships as a result. Facebook and Reddit really killed forums. Some our still around, but most are a shell of what they once were. The ones I was really involved in all shutdown after members started to spend more and more tim…

I joined a car forum a couple years ago and it was like a blast from the past. An actual community on the internet. People acting with respect generally, active and reasonable moderation, full control of the platform. Users coming together for a shared interest and knowledge but also just a hangout for like minded people to socialize. Plenty of people meeting up in real life, well known members who passed memorialize…

Reddit suffers greatly from the lack of quality moderation. The moderators on reddit remove spam or off-topic submissions but more than often leave low effort or just worthless threads up, which in turn invites more people to post similar content.

My favorite example of this is the /r/snes subreddit where most of the new posts seem to be photos of the games someone bought off somewhere. I've never seen anything like this on any old-style forums outside of a thread dedicated solely to this kind of thing.

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#17

Post by can3p »

I’ve been scratching my own itch lately trying to build a communication medium that I like.

IMO the problem with current social networks is their scale and public only approach. Any network that goes this way ends up with lots of bad actors and public only approach means that it’s easy to harass people and bots are economically viable.

I’ve addressed both points [0]. Visibility of the posts is limited to direct connections, you need a proxy connection to make a new one and at the same time it’s mega easy to import/export, markdown support and apis are there etc. That was my way to get miningful discussions back.

In general, you need to look to small scale places

[0]: https://github.com/can3p/pcom

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#18

Post by deafpolygon »

ManlyBread wrote: post #16
davkan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined a car forum a couple years ago and it was like a blast from the past. An actual community on the internet. People acting with respect generally, active and reasonable moderation, full control of the platform. Users coming together for a shared interest and knowledge but also just a hangout for like minded people to socialize. Plenty of people meeting up in real life, well known members who passed memorialize…

Reddit suffers greatly from the lack of quality moderation. The moderators on reddit remove spam or off-topic submissions but more than often leave low effort or just worthless threads up, which in turn invites more people to post similar content. My favorite example of this is the /r/snes subreddit where most of the new posts seem to be photos of the games someone bought off somewhere. I've never seen anything like…

> more than often leave low effort or just worthless threads up

to be fair, forums do this too - you're just less likely to notice because many forums would have multiple boards / forums where you would post in separate categories. very often, there would be a screenshots/picture forum.

reddit, due to how it's designed, is forced to organize everything under a single subreddit. labels help some, but it's just not the same.

Re: What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

#19

Post by deafpolygon »

I think, the "modern" equivalent is Discord. Unfortunately, it is what it is. mastodon, etc, tends to be popular for fringe / less mainstream politi-think.

> now im tryna do more serious work and cant find the right spots for it

you won't find /that much/ places for serious work - reddit certainly isn't it. twitter is definitely not.

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