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Google Groups has been left to die

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Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#201

Post by tylerhou »

jks wrote: post #176
lelandfe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the subtext of that comment is that they feel it can't be "left to die" as Groups is too important in the ecosystem.

Yes, but for those purposes it doesn't matter if the email features are left to die, such as the monospace fonts that don't render or the message read/unread status that's flaky.

People send emails with monospace fonts to internal Google Groups all the time. If there is a bug in the external Groups, there likely? is a bug in the internal Groups. If that's true, then it will be fixed soon.

The internal read/unread indicator has always been janky as well. But the point is that Google depends too much on Groups internally to let it die.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#202

Post by johannes1234321 »

coliveira wrote: post #166
bee_rider wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1977-1945=32 2023-1977=46 2023-32=1991 Quite a bit closer! That’s an interesting note, given that the Tie/X-wing fights were heavily inspired by WW2 dogfights, right? Can you imagine something that draws on the Gulf War similarly? It just seems wrong, too proximate to pull out purely aesthetic themes.

WW2 had an immense importance in the minds of people who lived it. Gulf War... who even cares about it, except for the ones involved? Many people don't even remember that.

Which of the gulfwars are you even talking about? - Even Korea and Vietnam, which were big and had quite some cultural impact, are more and more forgotten.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#203

Post by nr2x »

zamnos wrote: post #148
ryanwhitney wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tires…

Give me a break, long time Googlers use the most shit tools just because it’s in house. Google Chat is trash compared to Slack.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#204

Post by bentley »

bloppe wrote: post #175

Just use matrix. There are plenty of places that will host your rooms for free, and some will do it for a price. It's always possible that your host ("home server") will not last forever, and I'm not an expert on home server mobility, but it's certainly currently much better than any proprietary host, and the important part is that the community is empowered by the protocol to solve the problems they need solved, inc…

Realtime chat platforms like Matrix necessitate an entirely different sort of moderation compared to a traditional mailing list/forum-style community.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#206

Post by nr2x »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #68
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…

AtariAge.com[1] - first created in 1988, or 25 years ago. Run by some bloke on the internet. The problem for Google Groups is that no-one can perf-farm it any more, which is the sole reason for projects to survive at Google... 1: https://atariage.com/about.php

Correct, and a good chunk of layoffs were people who never got promoted because they were tending the garden. So it’s actually worse than that, anybody who tried to maintain something is marked for deletion by Ruth’s fire-a-tron

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#207

Post by jefftk »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #202
coliveira wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WW2 had an immense importance in the minds of people who lived it. Gulf War... who even cares about it, except for the ones involved? Many people don't even remember that.

Which of the gulfwars are you even talking about? - Even Korea and Vietnam, which were big and had quite some cultural impact, are more and more forgotten.

If someone just says "The Gulf War" they almost always mean the 1990-1991 invasion of Iraq ("Desert Storm"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#208

Post by nr2x »

eklitzke wrote: post #157
spacedcowboy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AtariAge.com[1] - first created in 1988, or 25 years ago. Run by some bloke on the internet. The problem for Google Groups is that no-one can perf-farm it any more, which is the sole reason for projects to survive at Google... 1: https://atariage.com/about.php

I don't think it is necessarily a "problem" that it can't be perf-farmed anymore though. Google groups isn't perfect but it does a lot of things well (the bugs mentioned in TFA not withstanding), is used extensively internally at Google, and doesn't necessarily need a lot of new features. There are a ton of internal products at Google that are also staffed by one or two people in maintenance mode and it's not a probl…

“Not a problem”…until they get laid off. Which has happened to many internal maintainers.

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#209

Post by mrtranscendence »

logifail wrote: post #198
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…

> Google Groups has survived 22 years [..] Well that prompted me to check, and it seems my primary domain name, and hence my email address[es], turn 23 years old this year! Hat tip to the person who prompted me - waaay back in 2000 - to register it.

I've had mine since 2007, which still feels like a long time to me. I was so young then ...

Re: Google Groups has been left to die

#210

Post by trvz »

ryanwhitney wrote: post #169
zamnos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tires…

Groups.io was founded by Mark Fletcher[0], who in '97 started the mailing list service that Yahoo! eventually bought and turned into their Groups product. They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1]. Nonetheless, they're small and one might guess there's a high bus factor here. (Sorry Mark!) I think it's a toss up either way. I hadn't seen talk of Google Groups being internally significant…

> They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1].

This isn't quite the brag you think it is.

10 years in, a product like this should be mostly fleshed out. On the linked page, I'm seeing design as well as technical changes mentioned. Also, they apparently only started working on translations recently.

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