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Google Groups has been left to die

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Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#141

Post by dalbasal »

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…

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 there makes it a good place for examples. But, Reddit was a commery startup that got bought many moons ago into a media conglomerate. It's not the examle of free.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#142

Post by anthk »

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…

alt.folklore computers

comp.unix*

comp.misc

comp.lang.*

comp.infosystems.gemini

comp.infosystems.gopher

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#144

Post by ksherlock »

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…

archive.org has some historical usenet dumps. There's no viewer so you need to download them as individual files (generally 1 file per group).

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#145

Post by anthk »

jedberg wrote: post #107

> It’s clear we ran afoul of the old lesson: don’t build communities for long-lasting FOSS projects on proprietary infrastructure you don’t control. We should not use Discord. So what should we use? An NNTP server and an IRC server? I understand that Google Groups was a really nice interface to NNTP, and all the real-time chat apps have better UX than IRC, but it seems like now is a great time to "go back to basics".…

If you want IM+videoconference+file transfers (and emojis), Jabber. Public places to discuss stuff, IRC. Decentralized fora, NNTP+TLS.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#146

Post by anthk »

Animats wrote: post #133
pwg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Either buy a low cost USENET account from a commercial provider, or sign up at http://www.eternal-september.org/ and then use a real USENET client (which will be better for interacting with USENET than the awful interface that is google groups).

Maybe all that's needed here is a better USENET client.

slrn it's fine. Killing SPAM it's very easy to do.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#147

Post by epaulson »

An open source project I'm involved with is thinking about its communications future, since we're currently on Google Groups and have been nervous about it for a while.

The leading contenders for us are either groups.io for a more email-list-focused setup, or Discourse, for a more web-forum focus but that has a (hopefully decent?) email-only interface.

For "realtime" chat, which we don't really do today but are getting pressured to have something, we are thinking gitter.im

Most of us grew up on either Usenet or Majordomo/Mailman lists and still have an email-first preference, since once the message is delivered anyone can handle it in their own workflow and with their own tools.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#148

Post by zamnos »

ryanwhitney wrote: post #80
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…

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 tiresome to find a successor. Groups.io doesn't have the kind of transparency for me to trust in its longevity. (I am in a group or two hosted there though.)

Meanwhile, large tech can keep something running well past the initial creator's interest as waned. Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Google 20 years after they founded it, but I doubt they've had the same passion for new algorithms to improve Internet search for far longer. Despite that, Google is going to be around for a long time. Can you say that about groups.io? I don't even know who the CEO is or where the company is based.

In the case of google groups, the important thing to realize is that Google is from an older era of the Internet, when people used mailing lists to keep in touch and wrote long form posts rather than pictures on Instagram. So dropping support for mailing lists simply would not work with the current company culture, and something deep ingrained into a company's culture is difficult to change, especially as new employess get steeped into that culture.

I'm not going to deny the idea that Google Groups it's been "left to die", but I'd expect to see a facelift and a upgrade to Google Groups long before it dies, simply because it's an important dogfood product.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#149

Post by astrostl »

nayroclade wrote: post #45
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…

While I also lament what Google Groups has become, let's not rewrite history. By 2001, Dejanews had rebranded as a shopping comparison site, ran out of money, and was on the verge of shutting down. I don't remember many people being upset about Google stepping in to save the archive. And, in the early days, the signs were positive. Google actually cared about it at that point, and still had a good reputation. They ex…

> 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.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#150

Post by bg24 »

Free systems offered by Corporations survive as long as there is incentive (justified ROI). Headcount movement decisions are done based on numbers. That said, 10+ years is a GOOD life expectancy of a software product used at scale.
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