11 ms·

The End of Gmane?

489 points by deng 10y ago

WorldMaker 10y ago
There are many open source projects whose only reliable, publicly accessible archive is and has been Gmane (due to changes in mailing list providers over the years or loss of their own backups/server resources/et al). If Gmane were to shutdown that would have huge implications for the "institutional knowledge" of some rather long-lived projects. Personally, I know I've relied on Gmane many times to help solve problems I've had with one open source project or another. I hope that this resolves well in favor of the protection of this archive as a resource, and I am sad at the recent troubles it has seen.
boterock 10y ago
I recently discovered Gmane, and found there were a lot of interesting topics, but also found that some (mainly videogames) were somewhat active before but now aren't active at all. I wish I had found it earlier. Still has been a tremendous resource as others have said.
angersock 10y ago
Another goodwill project maybe shutting down from stress. We have ridden a wave of altruism, and it is unclear if it will last.
XaspR8d 10y ago
What kinds of mailing lists did Gmane host? I'm not familiar with it and the site is down now so I can't browse...
- parfe 10y ago
  All of them.
- rogerbinns 10y ago
  The lists Gmane provided where primarily various open source projects and similar. Gmane doesn't host the mailing lists itself. Instead it provides access to lists hosted elsewhere. It does that by subscribing to the list and then saving the incoming messages. It then provides access to those messages using NNTP, or various web interfaces (different layouts etc). IIRC it may also provide RSS. It also allows posting to the lists by forwarding the message. The benefits are great as a reader since this is one place you can to read many lists, and you don't have to subscribe to each one etc. (Some may require subscribing for posting though.) The other benefit is that if you get people on mailing lists asking why use something archaic like email when the hotness is various web based boards, and the project is immediately and unconditionally doomed because that is what people are used to. You redirect those folks to Gmane where one of the layouts is web board style.
anc84 10y ago
> If somebody else wants to take over the concept, I can FedEx you a disk containing the archive (as an NNTP spool). Lights candles to summon Jason Scott to ingest it into the Internet Archive
- naveen99 10y ago
  or upload it to google big query or a self pay amazon s3 bucket... public datasets get free storage iirc. would be a nice complement to the reddit / hn datasets.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    > public datasets get free storage iirc I was not aware of this. Do you have a link? edit: self clarifying my own question. Not sure what the specifics for hosting an AWS Public data set are though. Big Query >A public dataset is any dataset that is stored in BigQuery and made available to the general public. This page lists a special group of public datasets that Google BigQuery hosts for you to access and integrate into your applications. Google pays for the storage of these data sets and provides public access to the data via BigQuery. You pay only for the queries that you perform on the data (the first 1 TB per month is free, subject to query pricing details). [0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/ https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/ AWS > Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. Learn more about Public Data Sets on AWS and visit the Public Data Sets forum. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/datasets/ https://aws.amazon.com/datasets/
  - jks 10y ago
    In https://web.archive.org/web/20160708085949/http://gmane.org/about.php https://web.archive.org/web/20160708085949/http://gmane.org/... (in the section titled "A Statement") Lars wrote he wouldn't "use any of the contents of the Gmane news spool for spamming, for advertisement, for sending mass mail, for gathering profiling information, or anything of that kind, or willingly allow anybody else to do the same". So I assume he wouldn't be fine with just making it all publicly downloadable but would want his successor to provide a similar guarantee.
zeveb 10y ago
If so, it'd be the end of an era. Gmane has been a tremendous asset to the community for well over a decade; indeed, it feels as though it's always been there. I suppose that it's one more nail in the coffin of NNTP. I really miss net news, but it probably wasn't possible for it to scale to support the entire world. It's sad, though: for a short time, all the interesting people in the world were able to communicate with one another.
- jandrese 10y ago
  A NNTP service could definitely still work, but it would have to be a lot more locked down. I really hate that the alternative is web forums which are always stuck with a small fraction of the functionality of any good news reader and get bogged down easily if they get popular and never have a good search feature.
  - snaky 10y ago
    NNTP is just the right abstraction to wrap any discussion-based thing. It would be nice to have just nntp://news.ycombinator.com, nntp://reddit.com and so on instead of bunch of incompatible APIs actually. It's like beautiful Perl's TIE [1] where you wrap an object in it and it exposed as regular scalar, array, hash or filehandle instead of 'an object' with it's own methods users need to learn to use it. I think Gmane 2.0, if it ever will be born, would have a mechanism of plugins, that allow easy wrapping any web-forum in it, by writing a little template describing the layout of pages like 'this is topic, this is message body' and so on. And the crawler to use the plugins, of course. [1] http://perldoc.perl.org/perltie.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perltie.html
    - jandrese 10y ago
      A version of NNTP where groups were automatically moderated and strong controls were in place to weed out spammers and trolls could work. The moderation would have to be baked into the core of the protocol and not some weird half measure bolted onto the side however. Once a community is large enough you either moderate it or you get another /b/.
concernedctzn 10y ago
Sounds like an awful situation to be in. GMane has been such a tremendous resource over the years.
throw7 10y ago
I use gmane with my nntp reader everyday. Thanks larsmagne23 for the service.
gghh 10y ago
I write here just to be counted. I love Gmane. This is sad news. Thanks Lars for all these years of work.
Xiol 10y ago
> All technical discussion took place on mailing lists those days, and archiving those were, at best, spotty and with horrible web interfaces. Not to take away from the contribution Gmane has made to many of my searches over the years, its web interface was one I always held as the epitome of awful design.
- oblio 10y ago
  Yeah, the web interface is a throwback to the 90s. Their content outweighs the drawback, though.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  I feel the same way. I don't want to diminish the work put into Gmane, but every time I hit a link to Gmane I jump to marc.info and see if I can read the content there. Still, I continue to be impressed by the amount of work people put into something they care about, while the rest of us just expects it to be there. As some one else pointed out, it really makes you wonder what other kind of one person projects we all use all the time.
  - taejo 10y ago
    And as a counterpoint, every time I hit a link to a Mailman archive, I would jump to gmane and try to find the thread there.
- slrz 10y ago
  Considering its awesome usability, the design can't be that bad. Sure, it might look dated by today's taste but its users don't care when they want to read a specific archived list thread with minimal friction.
rayvd 10y ago
There's also MarkMail and Marc. But neither have the NNTP interface (and no idea on how the # of lists tracked compares). Regardless, hope to see Gmane stick around.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  On the topic of Marc, i have found that its not as reliable about tracking threads.
Arathorn 10y ago
It would be awesome to just import the Gmane archive into Matrix.org and/or IPFS and continue it as a decentralised archive. Which would also (in time) be harder to DDoS, and would be run by the participants rather than being a centralised service!
cronjobber 10y ago
Yes, I've read about the stress. And yet. If Lars will mail out that disk to somebody, somebody may well just pitch to a bunch of VCs, build a fresh web interface and bury it all in ads. Couldn't Lars do that himself? The plastering it all in ads, I mean. As somebody in another comment said correctly, the age of online altruism is dead. We have our ideas who killed it, we mourn the passing of an age, but we can't change it. (OK, just ignore this if the ads are already all over Gmane. I wouldn't know, I adblock...)
- dspillett 10y ago
  > Couldn't Lars do that himself? The plastering it all in ads, I mean Perhaps he doesn't think the money is worth the admin time involved. He's still have to deal with take down requests and DoS attacks, and also have to deal with advertising companies too on top. He may also prefer not to see his creation go that way under his watch. I would suggest a better option would be to throw the content of the disk at a public hosting service if any of those who offer free hosting for public data sets would be relevant, or alternately put it out as a torrent until the content is sufficiently well distributed. I'd be happy to throw a chunk of bandwidth at the initial seeding effort as I'm sure would others. > the age of online altruism is dead (re: plastering it all in ads) Just because it is difficult to maintain the old ways, doesn't mean all us old timers are willing to take part in propagating the new ones that we don't like! > I wouldn't know, I adblock An example of your "online altruism is dead" fact. "You can pay for it with ads (that I personally won't see so don't expect me to contribute)". As more and more people block ads you have to get more and more crafty to make money out of them which makes the whole business just that little bit more shady with each passing day. As per my first two points I can certainly understand him not wanting to go in that direction, as I'd never volunteer for it myself.
  - Practicality 10y ago
    Whatever happened to the pay service model? I am actually happy to pay for services like this. Even if every user only paid $1/month it would probably cover most of the costs.
pmontra 10y ago
Even without the DoS issue, it's hard to keep carrying on a project alone year after year. A more resilient organizational pattern would be a group of people sharing the burden of managing all the issues and nuisances (obviously people can fight and break up.) Wouldn't the Internet Archive be interested in archiving all those mailing lists?
_nickwhite 10y ago
"If somebody else wants to take over the concept, I can FedEx you a disk containing the archive (as an NNTP spool)." It sounds like a great opportunity for someone (or a group of people) passionate about Gmane to take over the reins here. I'd hate to see a project with so much useful archived content to disappear.
laumars 10y ago
If the author reads this, how large are the dumps and is it something that can be pushed over SFTP or any other file transfer protocol? I might be tempted to have a play but I don't want you to be out of pocket FedExing the content for something that I cannot guarantee will go live.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  If you follow the update link at the end of the post, there are more details. It's 2 TB of data, so he probably prefers the FedEx cost over having his internet uplink saturated for a week.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Similarly Amazon provides an AWS HDD mail in service for large data sets.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Stationwagons full of tapes. Your best bandwidth option since 1981. Well, probably since 1951, but still. Obxkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
akkartik 10y ago
All the poor broken permalinks. Maybe Internet Archive would be interested?
skybrian 10y ago
It's yet another episode in how spam and abuse drive the Internet towards feudalism. Either you need a business willing to pay people to handle it, or real volunteer organization with a pool of volunteers, or some combination of them.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  This is why we can't have nice things.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I'm starting to see what I'm calling for now "hygiene factors" as a critical element and technological mechanism for almost anything. Maybe it's a generalisation of le Chatlier's principle (@btilly's got a good post on this). To make this concrete: put enough people or activity or stuff in some area and you end up with noxious effects. Bulk, bioactive, chemoactive, systemic, and even cultural impacts. For most towns and cities, water pollution and sanitation rapidly become pain points. For transport systems, congestion, but also highway robbery and piracy. For communications systems, it's the annoyance of low-quality or unwanted signals. A key point is that cost reduction makes all hygiene factors worse. You end up with more of the bad stuff. There's also scale effects. Ultimately, you need to apply different cost factors to the wanted and unwanted effects (generally through some form of policing, patrolling, filtering, reputation feedback, etc., etc.). Or you can limit the total size of unrestricted networks and provide gateways (with filters) between them. And yes, that means you're subject to policies (egress and ingress) on both sides of those filters.
ChrisArchitect 10y ago
wow, 2002. Yeah, it was a godsend when it launched. Essential part of usenet surfing and workflow. Great run Lars!
fsloth 10y ago
How many institutionally critical projects are run by solitary figures out of pure goodwill? There seems to be an obvious need for a foundation to find-and-fund critical projects like this so they don't go into oblivion.
- a3n 10y ago
  There was the timezone thing a few years back, but I think that was resolved, according to some definition of resolved. But that wasn't about lack of support, more a legal attack on the maintainer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#History
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Note that the blog mentions that he is being sued in India, and the recent DDOS is just the straw that's breaking the camel.
- exolymph 10y ago
  Nadia Eghbal has been working on this: https://medium.com/@nayafia/funding-digital-infrastructure-8b1bf8b8e4cb#.z74y27gak https://medium.com/@nayafia/funding-digital-infrastructure-8...
- alxmdev 10y ago
  One example that jumps to mind are all the documents and man pages hosted on die.net (http://linux.die.net/ http://linux.die.net/)
- cuckcuckspruce 10y ago
  This seems like something that the ISC[1] should handle. [1] https://www.isc.org/mission/ https://www.isc.org/mission/
jackfrodo 10y ago
A lot of gmane is not archived on archive.org :/ Really hope someone volunteers to continue this project.
gnuarch 10y ago
Apart from easy web access, is there more to the HTTP than the NNTP interface of Gmane? Like search over every message, maybe? If not, people should find their favourite newsreader and be all set, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders
- icebraining 10y ago
  Google indexes Gmane, so there is search over every message, and I've found it useful in the past.
- loeg 10y ago
  Google indexes Gmane HTTP, but not NNTP. That's a big feature.
- sargun 10y ago
  Gossamer threads is the closest. But, in so many ways, Gmane is just more reliable, and tends to pop up so much higher on Google.
- jks 10y ago
  There is (was) a decent search feature: https://web.archive.org/web/20160405154751/http://search.gmane.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160405154751/http://search.gma...
  - gnuarch 10y ago
    Thanks, I was already wondering about the dependency on Google here.
jwr 10y ago
Gmane has been a fantastic asset. For many reasons: archival, easy access to lists without subscribing, great reading interface via NNTP. I always wondered how Lars finds the energy and resources to maintain Gmane for all of us. It's sad that the dicks of the world are about to ruin such a great resource. It's also sad that such tremendous goodwill and a large amount of work gets ruined by a bunch of jerks. Thank you, Lars, for all the hard work over the years.
gnuarch 10y ago
As Wikinews is pronounced dead sometimes, it could become a News/list mirror :) Or maybe Wikidata?
c3534l 10y ago
Gmane Over
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I've never actually used Gmane. All the mailing lists I've used (relatively few) have their own archives. But that's just me.
- makomk 10y ago
  Most mailing lists I've used have a fairly poor archive interface compared to Gmane. Some of them are also missing parts of their own history due to careless maintenance.
- antod 10y ago
  My use case for gmane over nntp was to casually/loosely/irregularly follow along with a bunch of mailing lists in one place without cluttering up my email storage or interrupting me. A newsreader was a nice way to do that in a way the web just can't do.
escape_goat 10y ago
There has been an update in the comments thread: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/comment-page-1/#comment-13502 https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/com...
krelian 10y ago
Can someone explain what does anyone has to gain from ddosing Gmane?
- sverige 10y ago
  If you were on Usenet for long in the 90s, you developed your own way of answering this question. My answer to cope with this is that there may be many different rationalizations in the mind(s) of the attacker(s), or none at all. It is impossible to understand the psychology of trolls. Well, maybe not impossible, but certainly not worth the effort. They are basically noxious pests, like cockroaches in a restaurant or wasps at a barbecue.
wyager 10y ago
We need to start hosting these kinds of services on anonymizing networks to protect them from vacuous legal threats.
djsumdog 10y ago
I've used Gmane back when I was trying to debug linux-bluetooth issues to search through my old e-mail threads. It's a pretty helpful index. I didn't realize it was a single maintainer effort.
leni536 10y ago
Is Gmane open source?
emitstop 10y ago
Fine by me. The real Gucci Mane is back out of prison, what do we need this one for.
__b__ 10y ago
I have always liked the download.gmane.org option. I rarely use the web interface. I hope download.gmane.org does not disappear. Gmane is a truly great service. IMO, it does not need to be part of "the web". It's better than that. It's part of "the internet". One of the best parts.
simdiab 10y ago
It's amazing how many of these integral tools that we've relied on for a long time are maintained by selfless individuals in their basements. Fantastic.
Snesker 10y ago
das it gmane
kwhitefoot 10y ago
I haven't used Gmane or Gnus for quite a while but one vivid memory comes to mind of me having a problem with Gnus one Friday morning at about 11:00. So I posted a question asking if anyone else had the problem; I no longer remember what the problem was. What I do remember however is that within two hours I had a reply with an explanation and a fix from Lars Ingebrigtsen himself. That kind of support is literally priceless, you can't buy it from Microsoft or Google or Oracle, etc. And even when you can get some kind of support from them it takes hours or more likely days and is filtered through multiple layers of semi-competent drones regurgitating the official docs. I think it's horrible that Lars should be so stressed. All I can think of to say is just hand it over to someone and walk away; you've done your bit and more than most to make the Internet a good place, don't let it, or them, grind you down.
imadfy 10y ago
Yet again, I've clicked a gmane link in a google search to end up staring into the abyss. MILLIONS of broken links. Come on, Lars. Make it happen.

489 points by deng 10y ago

There are many open source projects whose only reliable, publicly accessible archive is and has been Gmane (due to changes in mailing list providers over the years or loss of their own backups/server resources/et al). If Gmane were to shutdown that would have huge implications for the "institutional knowledge" of some rather long-lived projects. Personally, I know I've relied on Gmane many times to help solve problems I've had with one open source project or another. I hope that this resolves well in favor of the protection of this archive as a resource, and I am sad at the recent troubles it has seen.

boterock 10y ago

I recently discovered Gmane, and found there were a lot of interesting topics, but also found that some (mainly videogames) were somewhat active before but now aren't active at all. I wish I had found it earlier. Still has been a tremendous resource as others have said.

angersock 10y ago

Another goodwill project maybe shutting down from stress. We have ridden a wave of altruism, and it is unclear if it will last.

XaspR8d 10y ago

What kinds of mailing lists did Gmane host? I'm not familiar with it and the site is down now so I can't browse...

parfe 10y ago
All of them.
rogerbinns 10y ago
The lists Gmane provided where primarily various open source projects and similar. Gmane doesn't host the mailing lists itself. Instead it provides access to lists hosted elsewhere. It does that by subscribing to the list and then saving the incoming messages. It then provides access to those messages using NNTP, or various web interfaces (different layouts etc). IIRC it may also provide RSS. It also allows posting to the lists by forwarding the message. The benefits are great as a reader since this is one place you can to read many lists, and you don't have to subscribe to each one etc. (Some may require subscribing for posting though.) The other benefit is that if you get people on mailing lists asking why use something archaic like email when the hotness is various web based boards, and the project is immediately and unconditionally doomed because that is what people are used to. You redirect those folks to Gmane where one of the layouts is web board style.

anc84 10y ago

> If somebody else wants to take over the concept, I can FedEx you a disk containing the archive (as an NNTP spool). Lights candles to summon Jason Scott to ingest it into the Internet Archive

naveen99 10y ago
or upload it to google big query or a self pay amazon s3 bucket... public datasets get free storage iirc. would be a nice complement to the reddit / hn datasets.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  > public datasets get free storage iirc I was not aware of this. Do you have a link? edit: self clarifying my own question. Not sure what the specifics for hosting an AWS Public data set are though. Big Query >A public dataset is any dataset that is stored in BigQuery and made available to the general public. This page lists a special group of public datasets that Google BigQuery hosts for you to access and integrate into your applications. Google pays for the storage of these data sets and provides public access to the data via BigQuery. You pay only for the queries that you perform on the data (the first 1 TB per month is free, subject to query pricing details). [0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/ https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/ AWS > Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. Learn more about Public Data Sets on AWS and visit the Public Data Sets forum. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/datasets/ https://aws.amazon.com/datasets/
- jks 10y ago
  In https://web.archive.org/web/20160708085949/http://gmane.org/about.php https://web.archive.org/web/20160708085949/http://gmane.org/... (in the section titled "A Statement") Lars wrote he wouldn't "use any of the contents of the Gmane news spool for spamming, for advertisement, for sending mass mail, for gathering profiling information, or anything of that kind, or willingly allow anybody else to do the same". So I assume he wouldn't be fine with just making it all publicly downloadable but would want his successor to provide a similar guarantee.

zeveb 10y ago

If so, it'd be the end of an era. Gmane has been a tremendous asset to the community for well over a decade; indeed, it feels as though it's always been there. I suppose that it's one more nail in the coffin of NNTP. I really miss net news, but it probably wasn't possible for it to scale to support the entire world. It's sad, though: for a short time, all the interesting people in the world were able to communicate with one another.

jandrese 10y ago
A NNTP service could definitely still work, but it would have to be a lot more locked down. I really hate that the alternative is web forums which are always stuck with a small fraction of the functionality of any good news reader and get bogged down easily if they get popular and never have a good search feature.
- snaky 10y ago
  NNTP is just the right abstraction to wrap any discussion-based thing. It would be nice to have just nntp://news.ycombinator.com, nntp://reddit.com and so on instead of bunch of incompatible APIs actually. It's like beautiful Perl's TIE [1] where you wrap an object in it and it exposed as regular scalar, array, hash or filehandle instead of 'an object' with it's own methods users need to learn to use it. I think Gmane 2.0, if it ever will be born, would have a mechanism of plugins, that allow easy wrapping any web-forum in it, by writing a little template describing the layout of pages like 'this is topic, this is message body' and so on. And the crawler to use the plugins, of course. [1] http://perldoc.perl.org/perltie.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perltie.html
  - jandrese 10y ago
    A version of NNTP where groups were automatically moderated and strong controls were in place to weed out spammers and trolls could work. The moderation would have to be baked into the core of the protocol and not some weird half measure bolted onto the side however. Once a community is large enough you either moderate it or you get another /b/.

concernedctzn 10y ago

Sounds like an awful situation to be in. GMane has been such a tremendous resource over the years.

throw7 10y ago

I use gmane with my nntp reader everyday. Thanks larsmagne23 for the service.

gghh 10y ago

I write here just to be counted. I love Gmane. This is sad news. Thanks Lars for all these years of work.

Xiol 10y ago

> All technical discussion took place on mailing lists those days, and archiving those were, at best, spotty and with horrible web interfaces. Not to take away from the contribution Gmane has made to many of my searches over the years, its web interface was one I always held as the epitome of awful design.

oblio 10y ago
Yeah, the web interface is a throwback to the 90s. Their content outweighs the drawback, though.
mrweasel 10y ago
I feel the same way. I don't want to diminish the work put into Gmane, but every time I hit a link to Gmane I jump to marc.info and see if I can read the content there. Still, I continue to be impressed by the amount of work people put into something they care about, while the rest of us just expects it to be there. As some one else pointed out, it really makes you wonder what other kind of one person projects we all use all the time.
- taejo 10y ago
  And as a counterpoint, every time I hit a link to a Mailman archive, I would jump to gmane and try to find the thread there.
slrz 10y ago
Considering its awesome usability, the design can't be that bad. Sure, it might look dated by today's taste but its users don't care when they want to read a specific archived list thread with minimal friction.

rayvd 10y ago

There's also MarkMail and Marc. But neither have the NNTP interface (and no idea on how the # of lists tracked compares). Regardless, hope to see Gmane stick around.

digi_owl 10y ago
On the topic of Marc, i have found that its not as reliable about tracking threads.

Arathorn 10y ago

It would be awesome to just import the Gmane archive into Matrix.org and/or IPFS and continue it as a decentralised archive. Which would also (in time) be harder to DDoS, and would be run by the participants rather than being a centralised service!

cronjobber 10y ago

Yes, I've read about the stress. And yet. If Lars will mail out that disk to somebody, somebody may well just pitch to a bunch of VCs, build a fresh web interface and bury it all in ads. Couldn't Lars do that himself? The plastering it all in ads, I mean. As somebody in another comment said correctly, the age of online altruism is dead. We have our ideas who killed it, we mourn the passing of an age, but we can't change it. (OK, just ignore this if the ads are already all over Gmane. I wouldn't know, I adblock...)

dspillett 10y ago
> Couldn't Lars do that himself? The plastering it all in ads, I mean Perhaps he doesn't think the money is worth the admin time involved. He's still have to deal with take down requests and DoS attacks, and also have to deal with advertising companies too on top. He may also prefer not to see his creation go that way under his watch. I would suggest a better option would be to throw the content of the disk at a public hosting service if any of those who offer free hosting for public data sets would be relevant, or alternately put it out as a torrent until the content is sufficiently well distributed. I'd be happy to throw a chunk of bandwidth at the initial seeding effort as I'm sure would others. > the age of online altruism is dead (re: plastering it all in ads) Just because it is difficult to maintain the old ways, doesn't mean all us old timers are willing to take part in propagating the new ones that we don't like! > I wouldn't know, I adblock An example of your "online altruism is dead" fact. "You can pay for it with ads (that I personally won't see so don't expect me to contribute)". As more and more people block ads you have to get more and more crafty to make money out of them which makes the whole business just that little bit more shady with each passing day. As per my first two points I can certainly understand him not wanting to go in that direction, as I'd never volunteer for it myself.
- Practicality 10y ago
  Whatever happened to the pay service model? I am actually happy to pay for services like this. Even if every user only paid $1/month it would probably cover most of the costs.

pmontra 10y ago

Even without the DoS issue, it's hard to keep carrying on a project alone year after year. A more resilient organizational pattern would be a group of people sharing the burden of managing all the issues and nuisances (obviously people can fight and break up.) Wouldn't the Internet Archive be interested in archiving all those mailing lists?

_nickwhite 10y ago

"If somebody else wants to take over the concept, I can FedEx you a disk containing the archive (as an NNTP spool)." It sounds like a great opportunity for someone (or a group of people) passionate about Gmane to take over the reins here. I'd hate to see a project with so much useful archived content to disappear.

laumars 10y ago

If the author reads this, how large are the dumps and is it something that can be pushed over SFTP or any other file transfer protocol? I might be tempted to have a play but I don't want you to be out of pocket FedExing the content for something that I cannot guarantee will go live.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
If you follow the update link at the end of the post, there are more details. It's 2 TB of data, so he probably prefers the FedEx cost over having his internet uplink saturated for a week.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Similarly Amazon provides an AWS HDD mail in service for large data sets.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Stationwagons full of tapes. Your best bandwidth option since 1981. Well, probably since 1951, but still. Obxkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

akkartik 10y ago

All the poor broken permalinks. Maybe Internet Archive would be interested?

skybrian 10y ago

It's yet another episode in how spam and abuse drive the Internet towards feudalism. Either you need a business willing to pay people to handle it, or real volunteer organization with a pool of volunteers, or some combination of them.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
dredmorbius 10y ago
I'm starting to see what I'm calling for now "hygiene factors" as a critical element and technological mechanism for almost anything. Maybe it's a generalisation of le Chatlier's principle (@btilly's got a good post on this). To make this concrete: put enough people or activity or stuff in some area and you end up with noxious effects. Bulk, bioactive, chemoactive, systemic, and even cultural impacts. For most towns and cities, water pollution and sanitation rapidly become pain points. For transport systems, congestion, but also highway robbery and piracy. For communications systems, it's the annoyance of low-quality or unwanted signals. A key point is that cost reduction makes all hygiene factors worse. You end up with more of the bad stuff. There's also scale effects. Ultimately, you need to apply different cost factors to the wanted and unwanted effects (generally through some form of policing, patrolling, filtering, reputation feedback, etc., etc.). Or you can limit the total size of unrestricted networks and provide gateways (with filters) between them. And yes, that means you're subject to policies (egress and ingress) on both sides of those filters.

ChrisArchitect 10y ago

wow, 2002. Yeah, it was a godsend when it launched. Essential part of usenet surfing and workflow. Great run Lars!

fsloth 10y ago

How many institutionally critical projects are run by solitary figures out of pure goodwill? There seems to be an obvious need for a foundation to find-and-fund critical projects like this so they don't go into oblivion.

a3n 10y ago
There was the timezone thing a few years back, but I think that was resolved, according to some definition of resolved. But that wasn't about lack of support, more a legal attack on the maintainer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#History
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Note that the blog mentions that he is being sued in India, and the recent DDOS is just the straw that's breaking the camel.
exolymph 10y ago
Nadia Eghbal has been working on this: https://medium.com/@nayafia/funding-digital-infrastructure-8b1bf8b8e4cb#.z74y27gak https://medium.com/@nayafia/funding-digital-infrastructure-8...
alxmdev 10y ago
One example that jumps to mind are all the documents and man pages hosted on die.net (http://linux.die.net/ http://linux.die.net/)
cuckcuckspruce 10y ago
This seems like something that the ISC[1] should handle. [1] https://www.isc.org/mission/ https://www.isc.org/mission/

jackfrodo 10y ago

A lot of gmane is not archived on archive.org :/ Really hope someone volunteers to continue this project.

gnuarch 10y ago

Apart from easy web access, is there more to the HTTP than the NNTP interface of Gmane? Like search over every message, maybe? If not, people should find their favourite newsreader and be all set, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders

icebraining 10y ago
Google indexes Gmane, so there is search over every message, and I've found it useful in the past.
loeg 10y ago
Google indexes Gmane HTTP, but not NNTP. That's a big feature.
sargun 10y ago
Gossamer threads is the closest. But, in so many ways, Gmane is just more reliable, and tends to pop up so much higher on Google.
jks 10y ago
There is (was) a decent search feature: https://web.archive.org/web/20160405154751/http://search.gmane.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160405154751/http://search.gma...
- gnuarch 10y ago
  Thanks, I was already wondering about the dependency on Google here.

jwr 10y ago

Gmane has been a fantastic asset. For many reasons: archival, easy access to lists without subscribing, great reading interface via NNTP. I always wondered how Lars finds the energy and resources to maintain Gmane for all of us. It's sad that the dicks of the world are about to ruin such a great resource. It's also sad that such tremendous goodwill and a large amount of work gets ruined by a bunch of jerks. Thank you, Lars, for all the hard work over the years.

gnuarch 10y ago

As Wikinews is pronounced dead sometimes, it could become a News/list mirror :) Or maybe Wikidata?

c3534l 10y ago

Gmane Over

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I've never actually used Gmane. All the mailing lists I've used (relatively few) have their own archives. But that's just me.

makomk 10y ago
Most mailing lists I've used have a fairly poor archive interface compared to Gmane. Some of them are also missing parts of their own history due to careless maintenance.
antod 10y ago
My use case for gmane over nntp was to casually/loosely/irregularly follow along with a bunch of mailing lists in one place without cluttering up my email storage or interrupting me. A newsreader was a nice way to do that in a way the web just can't do.

escape_goat 10y ago

There has been an update in the comments thread: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/comment-page-1/#comment-13502 https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/com...

krelian 10y ago

Can someone explain what does anyone has to gain from ddosing Gmane?

sverige 10y ago
If you were on Usenet for long in the 90s, you developed your own way of answering this question. My answer to cope with this is that there may be many different rationalizations in the mind(s) of the attacker(s), or none at all. It is impossible to understand the psychology of trolls. Well, maybe not impossible, but certainly not worth the effort. They are basically noxious pests, like cockroaches in a restaurant or wasps at a barbecue.

wyager 10y ago

We need to start hosting these kinds of services on anonymizing networks to protect them from vacuous legal threats.

djsumdog 10y ago

I've used Gmane back when I was trying to debug linux-bluetooth issues to search through my old e-mail threads. It's a pretty helpful index. I didn't realize it was a single maintainer effort.

leni536 10y ago

Is Gmane open source?

emitstop 10y ago

Fine by me. The real Gucci Mane is back out of prison, what do we need this one for.

__b__ 10y ago

I have always liked the download.gmane.org option. I rarely use the web interface. I hope download.gmane.org does not disappear. Gmane is a truly great service. IMO, it does not need to be part of "the web". It's better than that. It's part of "the internet". One of the best parts.

simdiab 10y ago

It's amazing how many of these integral tools that we've relied on for a long time are maintained by selfless individuals in their basements. Fantastic.

Snesker 10y ago

das it gmane

kwhitefoot 10y ago

I haven't used Gmane or Gnus for quite a while but one vivid memory comes to mind of me having a problem with Gnus one Friday morning at about 11:00. So I posted a question asking if anyone else had the problem; I no longer remember what the problem was. What I do remember however is that within two hours I had a reply with an explanation and a fix from Lars Ingebrigtsen himself. That kind of support is literally priceless, you can't buy it from Microsoft or Google or Oracle, etc. And even when you can get some kind of support from them it takes hours or more likely days and is filtered through multiple layers of semi-competent drones regurgitating the official docs. I think it's horrible that Lars should be so stressed. All I can think of to say is just hand it over to someone and walk away; you've done your bit and more than most to make the Internet a good place, don't let it, or them, grind you down.

imadfy 10y ago

Yet again, I've clicked a gmane link in a google search to end up staring into the abyss. MILLIONS of broken links. Come on, Lars. Make it happen.