46 ms·

Google Groups has been left to die

507 points by ahelwer 4y ago

zzzeek 4y ago
right, use github discussions. then come back here in 5 years for "github discussions has been left to die" as we will all using Corporate Antigravitity Chat Discussions then, obviously
bborud 4y ago
Has anyone looked at modernizing NNTP in the past decade?
- pasc1878 4y ago
  What new features does it need? And I think make it in the last three decades.
  - bborud 4y ago
    Expectations have changed a bit over the years. People want to be able to apply more formatting to text, incorporate images, videos, emojis etc. If you look at Slack I think you get some idea about what I'm on about. Especially with respect to embedded media. You can, of course, do all that with HTML, but just using raw HTML posted directly from clients would result in too much chaos (and security challenges). Perhaps a somewhat constrained HTML that doesn't include styling so that styling is primarily done at the newsgroup level and can be overridden in the client? I'd probably prefer going with something simpler. Like Markdown. Perhaps something could be done about how you quote parts of other postings. So you have markup for quoting text (that refers to a section of a posting). Now, these things aren't stricly NNTP specific, but about content. But they would be easier to implement if you had some machinery for handling binary content, quoting content etc. in NNTP. The idea of a single USENET isn't really viable anymore, so you'd have to think about how you can make something similar which is distributed in nature. Some of this is down to creating better clients that can deal with, for instance, you reading 100 forums spread across 20 servers without a lot of silly management. Another thing that would be interesting is to be able to quote content from or refer to postings residing on other servers than the one you are posting to. Then there's identity, encryption and all that jazz. The simplest way to solve identity is to just use whatever providers people already use (FAANG). But you could perhaps investigate other ways to solve identity. Especially if you want to support various degrees of anonymity. (Then there's stuff like content moderation, the ability to modify and version postings etc etc) I think the most challenging bit is to create good clients.
    - pasc1878 4y ago
      Here we are on a text only board - how is that changing expectations. Quoting parts of older posing is one of the strengths of NNTP clients, they all to it in a common way. A single USENET was one of the great benefits I don't like going to many different places to get information. I would not that good clients could deal with multiple servers and for us techies things like leafnode made multiple servers easy. Altering things after posting is a nasty thing - how often do people take snapshots of Twitter so when it is deleted then you can show what someone had done nefariously,
gtk40 4y ago
We use Google Groups for a non-profit I'm involved with and it works well. Not sure on a replacement that will work well for us yet.
- shagie 4y ago
  What are the requirements / key features of Google Groups that you use?
- jmclnx 4y ago
  This is one of many free replacements for google groups. I have been using that for years. https://www.newsgroupreviews.com/eternal-september.html https://www.newsgroupreviews.com/eternal-september.html
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    Not exactly it does newsgroups only which is a small part of Goole groups. Most of Google Groups is mailing lists which can just be created unlike a newsgroup.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Checkout Topicbox by Fastmail... fills the niche perfectly!
- rexreed 4y ago
  Is it for a mailing list or for a website archive? You can self-host a listserv on many shared hosting sites for pennies.
- mercacona 4y ago
  Check if your country has public-funded LISTSERV/Mailman/* instances. If not, I'll check https://gaggle.email https://gaggle.email
cauthon 4y ago
I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Hackers and spammers too. Famously bad security (which somehow got PHP got blamed for, rather than specific software) principles.
  - amenghra 4y ago
    PHP got blamed for because it handed developers guns to shoot themselves in the foot with.
  - cauthon 4y ago
    Yeah, I’m not a web dev, but I assumed there were one or more technical limitations that led to its decline. I liked the interface, and the familiarity when seemingly every small-to-medium forum online was built on it. Plus they were all scrapable. There’s a ton of information that’s hard or impossible to find now that these conversations are typically siloed in slack or discord.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    I remember how many mods for phpBB were installed by literally doing find/replaces on the source files. Absolutely insane we had people out there doing that who didn't know any PHP!
  - Zak 4y ago
    In fairness, early PHP often made it much easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing while simultaneously targeting beginner web developers.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    While there are still forums using old software, and more importantly, not moderated, which are overrun by spam, surely this isn't the case for those that keep up ? (I'm also wondering how much field-specific registration questions help there, and what are the non-GAFAM alternatives to Captcha ?)
bushbaba 4y ago
Better it’s left up than killed off.
blahblah1234567 4y ago
[flagged]
- scrollaway 4y ago
  And anyone who comments on Google-related topics with the link to killedbygoogle is beating a dead horse... So tired of that argument.
  - blahblah1234567 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - coreyp_1 4y ago
    Actually, I didn't know about the site, so I'm glad that the comment was posted. It seems like a great resource for project idea prompts that can be taken, modified/customized/generalized/specialized into something new!
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      It's also mentioned and linked to in the second sentence of the article.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between products that google started and killed and products that google bought and killed. The former can be a sign of healthy experimentation. The latter is just frustrating, particularly when Google paid a lot for the product in question. Groups at least partly came out of the Dejanews acquisition and seeing something purchased by a company that will be a poor steward is frustrating.
  - amf12 4y ago
    > My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between products that google started and killed and products that google bought and killed. Or products that were merged in other products [1], or which had newer versions [2]. [1] Google Bookmarks, Password Checkup Extension -> Chrome, etc. [2]: Nest Hub, Nexus Phones, OnHub.
jmclnx 4y ago
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 the abortion that is google news. Good riddance google groups, do not let the door hit you on the way out.
- bpye 4y ago
  If Google Groups is actually going to die would it not be worth scraping the history for at least some groups?
  - chx 4y ago
    It would be so much nicer if someone from Google -- we know they are reading this forum could release the archive to Archive.org. Google doesn't do much with it, they removed Advanced Search so... why not?
    - zamnos 4y ago
      It's due to legal challenges, unfortunately, and as Manu Cornet's org chart depicts[1], this means that there just isn't the resources at Google to deal with it, nor is there the insurgent counter-culture to release it via torrent on 4chan. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6
- nayroclade 4y ago
  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 expanded the archive with contributions from other sources and worked to improve the search and posting interfaces. Yes, eventually they lost interest and it degraded into the current abomination, but that happened later.
jdfellow 4y ago
Google Groups performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver against USENET, by way of their acquisition of DejaNews and then implementing their own forum/mailing list interface on top if it. But, I wonder how many communities that are using Google Groups would be suitably served by falling back to USENET. I suppose it would require some updates to both NNTP server software to be easier to administer (if you want to go that route), and especially NNTP client readers to be more modern and user-friendly.
- sixothree 4y ago
  I have a theory related to google products - they can only exist if they can capture user data in a manner that is unique compared to their other products.
- haolez 4y ago
  The problem with USENET is spam. Moderation can be a burden. I suppose Google has some systems in place to mitigate this.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    These days, it should be fairly easy to combat this. Everyone subscribes their messages. Client sw allows whitelisting the signatures. Whitelisted signatures can vouch for new signatures to be added. User can easily silence any signature. Messages that are hidden (because the signature is not whitelisted) are shown if a whitelisted message replies to them. I'm sure I didn't catch all the edge cases, but the main idea is that the system is distributed, built on reputation, and self-managed. Everyone is responsible for the content they receive.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      That's just bozo filters with a side of Web of Trust. It's been done. Bozo filters help with spam on the client side but don't do anything about spam on the server side. Servers still have to host everything because they can't know a priori what clients will want or not. Not that your idea is necessarily bad but it breaks a lot of the utility of Usenet to have whitelist based filtering. I can't know ahead of time I like your posts and want to whitelist you. I also don't want to have to "know a guy" to get involved in a group (via Web of Trust).
throw7 4y ago
I miss nntp. Gmane used to be my goto after nntp use fell off, but that died also (I get it though... the work to keep that working is not something I would want to do).
- taviso 4y ago
  I'm still a daily gmane user, thankfully you're mistaken and it's still alive and well, just nntp only (news.gmane.io)! I honestly don't know what I would do if it did die, it's such a large part of how I use the internet.
  - throw7 4y ago
    I'll check things out again later. At some point I remember things getting unstable and not being able to post messages (this was when the original owner was giving up).
    - pasc1878 4y ago
      Gmane nntp access still works and I don't think has had any issues. The web interface to gmane has gone (due to self admitted errors by the original owner)
skim1420 4y ago
I don't disagree with the core point that long-horizon, FOSS communities should think twice before operating atop services like Google Groups. Also the particular quality atrophy and feature degradation sucks. Perhaps it's better framed to say that Groups is not prioritizing the particular users that the author is speaking on behalf of (ack, the monospace thing is a serious bug beyond FOSS communities). Google Groups and the shared infrastructure underneath is a critical piece of GSuite and GCP in many places, and I'd be very surprised if it ended up on the Killed By Google list.
sfc32 4y ago
Good!
ericand 4y ago
Or- great work to Google for maintaining a product that has waned in popularity and not killing it off!
- proser 4y ago
  Mentioned elsewhere, but Groups is a core part of their business offering. It's how lists and permissions get set up in lots of orgs using Google for enterprise email, docs, etc. View it as an extension of that and you can understand why consumer facing features seem stagnant.
modeless 4y ago
Google groups will never die because Google uses it to manage internal mailing lists.
- cmh89 4y ago
  Couldn't they just bring it internal? It must cost a good deal of money to keep it going, even if its not actively worked on.
  - benhurmarcel 4y ago
    It's used heavily by many other companies that pay for Google Workspace too.
- troyastorino 4y ago
  Google groups is also the mechanism for defining groups for viewing/editing permissions, comments, calendar invites, etc across Google Workspace and for access permissions in GCP. That group definition aligns nicely with being a mailing list grouping. Those use cases are not going to go away, and I would expect Google will invest in them more (as Workspace has been an area that Google has significantly invested in, and I'd argue has been doing a good job).
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    I think this is a key point that many people don't realize. The ACL groups and mailing lists you create in Google Workspace are the same groups you see when you go to groups.google.com. This is absolutely integral to Google Workspace as you point out and isn't going anywhere.
    - urbandw311er 4y ago
      If this really is true then @AlbertCory’s comment earlier in this thread about there just being one guy working on Groups is absolutely terrifying.
- 4y ago
klodolph 4y ago
I would love to hear some recommendations for ways to build communities and discussion forums that are a bit more robust. Been seeing a minor resurgence of phpBB sites, as a reaction to the problems inherent in Discord and Reddit. When I research forum software, it seems like the space has more or less stagnated over the past 20 years, except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month). Some of the options I like in this space are newsgroups, majordomo mailing lists (with public archives), and phpBB. These pieces of software all had a long lifespan, and have some good qualities when it comes to archiving discussions and ease of use. Obviously, newsgroups are no longer a viable option. It does seem like we could do better these days, without outsourcing our communities to Reddit or Discord.
- biorach 4y ago
  > except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month). You can self-host Discourse I've set it up for a local community group. Was straighforward and not resource hungry for a small community
- creatonez 4y ago
  > except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month). No? Discourse is free like phpBB. Edit: Wow, they have really hidden the possibility for self-hosting from their website. It's still here, though - https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
davidw 4y ago
What's really crazy to me is that I'm on a local Google Group for the cycling community in the city I'm in. I somewhat regularly fish stuff out of my Gmail spam folder that went from Someone's personal gmail account -> Google Group -> My Gmail account. The message never left Google's infrastructure, and it's still being flagged as spam! They should have a lot of insight into those messages and be able to ascertain that it is not spam.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  It's crowd-sourced. If there are gmail users that have marked traffic from that group as spam, it is spam. Doing anything else would violate the neutrality of Google with respect to classification, and probably upset eurocrats of various flavors.
- david_allison 4y ago
  This also happens with Google-owned projects. A fair amount of Google Summer of Code communication goes to spam.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- em-bee 4y ago
  a lot of gmail accounts are used to send spam, so having a gmail account as a source is not an indication of quality, and those need to be filtered just as much.
  - davidw 4y ago
    You'd think that having some data about the sending account would allow them to be more confident. They should know that it's not a spam account - or if it is, act on it?
    - delfinom 4y ago
      The problem is gmail's infrastructure is most likely (a) built for speed and processing the billions of emails a day and (b) legacy, it probably has none of the access to Google's modern infrastructure such as rating gmail account "quality"
nightpool 4y ago
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 figure out email delivery? the article has a one-line tossed off aside at the end to say "Certainly self-hosted FOSS communities can die, but these are functions of community activity itself rather than the service they’re hosted on", but without considering that the absolute most crucial time for community resources to survive is through periods of lackluster or nonexistent community involvement. If you have a Google Group full of, say, formal methods programming experts, then it can spend 5 years fallow and still be chock-full of absolutely vital historical resources and even spring back into life as people start using it again for discussion. That sort of longevity just can't exist if someone stopped paying the hosting bills for their self-hosted TLA discourse forum 3 years in.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  nerd argument and fanfiction site spacebattles.com https://forums.spacebattles.com/history/ https://forums.spacebattles.com/history/ I'm sure there are lots of niche sites that have lasted as long. Thats just off the top of my head.
  - rob 4y ago
    https://offtopic.com/ https://offtopic.com/ is still going and I believe it started in 2000?
  - livrem 4y ago
    I still visit some web forums that has been online since the 90's. At least two still use the same ancient software that they have used since ~1995. One of those is shut down a few hours every night (US time) for "database maintenance". I find that more adorable than annoying. Used to hate web-forums. Usability is so bad compared to USENET. But now they are goldmines of probably unique content, and far better than Discord or Facebook Groups.
AlbertCory 4y ago
In about 2006 at Google, I met a guy who was working on Groups. He was the only one, and he was remote, even before that was a Thing. It's always been the thing no one wants to work on there. I'm pretty sure they could make it a permanent 20% project, if those ar still happening. I wouldn't be surprised if it already does get most of its love that way.
- blitzar 4y ago
  That person might still be there and they might still be the only one on the product.
scottfr 4y ago
Google Groups is heavily used within Google's ecosystem. Specifically it is: - a system for managing group-based access for Google Workspace users, e.g. share a Google Doc with a group to give all members access - a system for managing group-based access to Google Cloud Platform resources, e.g. share a BigQuery table with a Google Group to give all group members access to it. - a simple way for Google Workspace users to create shared email addresses. e.g. support@mycompany.com It serves these purposes quite well.
- gtirloni 4y ago
  Yes, Google Groups is used for much more than emails. That's not the point of the article though.
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    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.
    - jks 4y ago
      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.
      - tylerhou 4y ago
        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.
      - lrem 4y ago
        I find it surprising that people use the groups webapp as a way to read the email. Isn't your email client more convenient? Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, but never beem responsible for anything close to Groups.
LastTrain 4y ago
So, how does one host a forum that will outlive the current ownership and members? What are the options out there? Create a collection at archive.org and do regular dumps there?
jdulay19 4y ago
As an outsider, why wouldn't anyone just migrate this to Slack/Discord/etc?
- patja 4y ago
  Slack is prohibitively expensive if you need more than 90 days of history, and Discord isn't very open or great for search.
- shagie 4y ago
  The question is "what type of interaction are you after?" Chat systems are good for the "I need help now" and "I want to chat..." but for some things a single message takes an hour or day or more thought to formulate a proper response. In those situations, the real time nature of chat causes discussions of a topic to become disjoint. USENET, email, forums and the like can have single topic threads / chains / posts where one topic is followed across days or weeks or months which is sometimes needed for hard problems.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
Been a long slow decline, it’s frustrating to watch it degrade. Imagine being an engineer assigned to this unloved thing; or worse, a product manager. Career death. https://groups.io https://groups.io is a good replacement for email lists. It’s mostly a for-pay product. https://www.usenetarchives.com/ https://www.usenetarchives.com/ is a good search engine for pre-2000 Usenet. Like Google’s old Deja archive which has been nearly unusable via Google Groups for years now.
- itamarst 4y ago
  https://groups.io https://groups.io is good for mailing lists, yes.
phneutral26 4y ago
[flagged]
qwertox 4y ago
I never understood how Discord can be seen as a replacement for mailing lists. To me it is the absolute chaos from a usability viewpoint and possibly a good place to chat about things which are not to be seen as persistent. To me the main alternative would be a Discourse-based platform, which can be seen as an evolution to the traditional PHP-based bulletin boards. I really hope that Google Groups doesn't shut down, but at this point I'm close to believing that Google care to disappoint. Then again, aren't a lot of Android development discussions taking place on Google Groups?
Alex3917 4y ago
FWIW I recently wrote a Discourse plug-in proposal to help communities migrate their existing content from Google Groups to Discourse, while giving members who prefer email the ability to fully participate from their inbox without any major changes from the current Google Groups experience. I didn't get a ton of interest so I haven't moved forward in productizing this, but all of the email parsing code is already written (and in production), so I can still ship a plug-in if this is something that other folks actually care about: https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposed-plugin-to-improve-reply-by-email-accuracy/252944 https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposed-plugin-to-improve-repl...
lacker 4y ago
I love open source but I think this analysis misses the real problem. In 2023, communities built purely on "mailing list" style tools are much less engaging and useful than communities that allow live discussions. For example, the author refers to the SMT-LIB google group. There has only been one message posted there in the last month! That isn't a "google groups" problem, it's a "nobody wants to use a mailing list any more" problem. I don't think using open source tools would have solved this issue. Mailman is open source and for a long time was the obvious open source alternative to Google Groups but hardly anyone is recommending that you migrate from Google Groups to Mailman! That said, there's nothing wrong with looking for an open source solution. It makes sense to try open source tools when you're talking about a community built around open source software. Zulip seems worth a try.
dalbasal 4y ago
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. Features invented over the last 30 years have value. Usenet can't be our YouTube or Facebook. But.. I refuse to believe open protocols got so much of the job done for so long, but the last mile requires a unicorn to platformize it. There aren't that many hurdles to taking social media back. Login/identity. HN demonstrates that this can be relatively simple. Hosting. Not quite as simple, apparently. Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway. There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again?
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > 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", or as we're seeing in the wake of the Russian invasion by enemy propaganda. > Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway. Nope. Reddit's various cesspools, from lolicon to the_donald [1], show that any platform needs centralized moderation lest it became overrun by any of the groups listed above. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Mastodon is social media, not a platform, and Gab (or Truth social), despite being bigger than all the other of its servers, haven't managed to "overrun" it.
  - dalbasal 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Octokiddie 4y ago
> GitHub is wonderful now but fundamentally proprietary, same as Google Groups, and FOSS software forges like sourcehut are making great progress. It may be impossible to imagine now, but a similarly craptaculous outcome for GitHub should not be ruled out. Back when SourceForge was revered as the be-all, end-all of open source development, few could imagine a future in which the service just kept getting worse and worse.
altairprime 4y ago
Discussion forums are not a viable substitute for encoding solved problems into documentation. This will continue to be a new discovery each time a service shuts down. If a solution is not incorporated your effort’s formal documentation, then that solution will eventually be lost. Trying to shift the burden of documenting solutions from the project to the forum archives, whether hosted or outsourced, will eventually fail.
summerlight 4y ago
Not sure why it has a perception of being abandoned. IIRC, it still has a considerably larger team compared to other real dying products. Also it has a clear role inside the Google Workspace. It's obviously prioritizing enterprise users, but it doesn't necessarily mean public groups are being shut down anytime soon.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jedberg 4y ago
> 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". Maybe IRC and NNTP would get some great client improvements if a bunch of open source groups settled on it?
- anthk 4y ago
  If you want IM+videoconference+file transfers (and emojis), Jabber. Public places to discuss stuff, IRC. Decentralized fora, NNTP+TLS.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  I'm a huge fan of decentralisation, but I am 100% not going back to IRC. I want the modern features too. Matrix seems to cover this.
londons_explore 4y ago
Google groups is widely used internally to Google. it isn't going away anytime soon.
Animats 4y ago
Does it still gateway to Usenet? Could people just use Usenet without Google?
- pwg 4y ago
  Yes. Either buy a low cost USENET account from a commercial provider, or sign up at http://www.eternal-september.org/ 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).
  - Animats 4y ago
    Maybe all that's needed here is a better USENET client.
    - anthk 4y ago
      slrn it's fine. Killing SPAM it's very easy to do.
madmax108 4y ago
It's honestly scary for some of these old-school Google products that have become vast stores of knowledge. Besides Google Groups, I worry a lot about the future of Blogger/Blogspot. I personally have a blog that I have maintained from 2007-08 and I often worry about Google just wiping off a part of my internet presence (my own little corner of the web). Google has pretty much left Blogspot to die for better half of the last decade. And speaking unselfishly, I often find blogger/blogspot blogs on obscure tech topics (usually with the default blogspot template) and I worry how much info we'll just lose to the void if/when Google decides to pull the plug (even with a grace-period, I'm sure most folks wouldn't bother to move this data). Really shows the value of archival services on the internet and why we need to ensure they can function over time!
orcajerk 4y ago
[flagged]
zabzonk 4y ago
i used it to do tech support for my CSVFix foss software. it was free and worked ok - what more do you want? at least it lasted much longer than google code, which is where i used to host my foss projects. when that closed, i switched to bit bucket (mercurial user here) and then they dropped mercurial support. i sure can pick them!
p41nt 4y ago
I wish there was a modern email listserv for people to subscribe / unsubscribe and maybe manage posting permissions for. Using chat servers or forums is an extra barrier for people to overcome and prevents collaboration from a broader set of people. Mailgun kind of has a list service that works. But not an easy way for end users to self manage. Curious if anyone could recommend something that could be selfhosted or worth paying for?
debacle 4y ago
I just started using Google Groups and love it. Is it going by the wayside?
dsr_ 4y ago
https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ is a web forum. Which is also on Usenet/NNTP. Which is also a mailing list archive. And also an IRC bot. AGPL. https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
- jordigh 4y ago
  It's also blazingly fast. An awesome D app.
epaulson 4y ago
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.
bg24 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kazinator 4y ago
They should switch to a Usenet newsgroup. Then they could keep using the same awful web interface that they are used to, for the time being, and gradually start switch to NNTP-based newsreaders.
fuddle 4y ago
Nice to see the author created discussion threads on lobste.rs, Hacker News and r/programming
politician 4y ago
I disagree, Google Groups and Usenet are immortal now that they have been included into LLM training corpuses.
steren 4y ago
Google Groups actually received a very big UI refresh ~ 2 years ago. I bet that was a complete re-write of the UI stack, not something you see for a product which would have been left to die.
bloppe 4y ago
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, including mobility and longevity, if need be. But that's just a worst-case scenario. It would be surprising to have to solve these problems yourself.
- bentley 4y ago
  Realtime chat platforms like Matrix necessitate an entirely different sort of moderation compared to a traditional mailing list/forum-style community.
asah 4y ago
Groups for Business seems to be thriving and has many new features, especially for admins. (it's well integrated with free/consumer Groups, and I assume they use the same codebase, i.e. consumer Groups is just a tiny subset)
javajosh 4y ago
It's interesting to consider this genre, the "community website". The primary functions are chat, forums, maybe a wiki or a blog. So a "community website" is a union of all the modes people use to communicate on the web. Therefore the solution is going to be a curated compose.yml that runs best-in-class versions of each thing with baked-in identity configuration and its own strong community around data movement between processes. Imagine a website that helps users build their own compose.yml based on their choice of components, similar to https://start.spring.io/ https://start.spring.io/. However, even if you had this, the "exercise for the reader" will be substantial: get a domain name and a host, learn to admin linux and docker. Finally get the compose file and run it. And learn to troubleshoot each process, with its unique runtime and build, when things go wrong. This is a heavy investment, but probably worth it. Kind of like learning to work on your own car.
j2kun 4y ago
Weird because Google groups is heavily used internally at Google. Unless there's an internal replacement coming, I don't see how it could die.
dingosity 4y ago
If only there were a protocol for distribution of MIME messages across a distributed network of computers. Alas. We may never find a solution that is not tied to a specific vendor.
- howard941 4y ago
  NNTP?
  - dingosity 4y ago
    yup.
    - pasc1878 4y ago
      How do you add a new group for your new project?
- urbandw311er 4y ago
  This is sarcasm right? The answer being SMTP and email.
rtkwe 4y ago
Every now and then I wonder with a twinge of fear how long until GMail makes it to the top of the list of potential axes on some mid level execs desk looking for cost centers to cut.
pentagrama 4y ago
5+ years ago I participate on a project who started a community from the ground up using a self-hosted https://discourse.org https://discourse.org. The experience was pretty great, the user experience in general is good, onboarding is straight forward, is mobile friendly, it has email and in-app notifications for replies, weekly digests and more. And you own the data! Later down the road, a chat platform was necessary too, and we use Telegram channels for that. I remember considering some OSS/Self-Hosted options for that but Telegram was really easy and the trade-off was worth it.
thestepafter 4y ago
Is anyone else experiencing where they have a paid Google business subscription for Gmail, Drive, etc and receive emails about posts to their Google group but even as an admin you are unable to access the content in the links? I never setup Google groups for my company but I receive an alert every time a spammer posts something. There has been no response from Google support on this.
sideproject 4y ago
For community forums and tools somewhat similar to Google Groups, I've recently launched HN+ https://www.hn.plus https://www.hn.plus I've always wanted to create my own HN clone and use it for myself. Yes, there are many many forum tools out there :)
2-718-281-828 4y ago
Google acts like it's suffering from ADHD.
Blackthorn 4y ago
Better it goes untouched than they try to "improve" it like what happened with the YouTube Music migration.
jen20 4y ago
I dread seeing an answer on a google group past about 6pm, since the CSS for dark mode is completely broken…
tracker1 4y ago
Usenet/NNTP is the way... Although most text/discussion groups are long dead, I think it's still a good idea in general. The move away from this towards email lists and Google Groups in the first place is/was IMO problematic. Much like moves away from IRC.
bentt 4y ago
This is where Academia should be jumping in to provide something open and backed with endowment money.
dakial1 4y ago
Wouldn't this be a valid use case for web3? As a decentralized group will exist as long as there are active nodes(users?), no need to depend on the goodwill of 1 sole host.

507 points by ahelwer 4y ago

right, use github discussions. then come back here in 5 years for "github discussions has been left to die" as we will all using Corporate Antigravitity Chat Discussions then, obviously

bborud 4y ago

Has anyone looked at modernizing NNTP in the past decade?

pasc1878 4y ago
What new features does it need? And I think make it in the last three decades.
- bborud 4y ago
  Expectations have changed a bit over the years. People want to be able to apply more formatting to text, incorporate images, videos, emojis etc. If you look at Slack I think you get some idea about what I'm on about. Especially with respect to embedded media. You can, of course, do all that with HTML, but just using raw HTML posted directly from clients would result in too much chaos (and security challenges). Perhaps a somewhat constrained HTML that doesn't include styling so that styling is primarily done at the newsgroup level and can be overridden in the client? I'd probably prefer going with something simpler. Like Markdown. Perhaps something could be done about how you quote parts of other postings. So you have markup for quoting text (that refers to a section of a posting). Now, these things aren't stricly NNTP specific, but about content. But they would be easier to implement if you had some machinery for handling binary content, quoting content etc. in NNTP. The idea of a single USENET isn't really viable anymore, so you'd have to think about how you can make something similar which is distributed in nature. Some of this is down to creating better clients that can deal with, for instance, you reading 100 forums spread across 20 servers without a lot of silly management. Another thing that would be interesting is to be able to quote content from or refer to postings residing on other servers than the one you are posting to. Then there's identity, encryption and all that jazz. The simplest way to solve identity is to just use whatever providers people already use (FAANG). But you could perhaps investigate other ways to solve identity. Especially if you want to support various degrees of anonymity. (Then there's stuff like content moderation, the ability to modify and version postings etc etc) I think the most challenging bit is to create good clients.
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    Here we are on a text only board - how is that changing expectations. Quoting parts of older posing is one of the strengths of NNTP clients, they all to it in a common way. A single USENET was one of the great benefits I don't like going to many different places to get information. I would not that good clients could deal with multiple servers and for us techies things like leafnode made multiple servers easy. Altering things after posting is a nasty thing - how often do people take snapshots of Twitter so when it is deleted then you can show what someone had done nefariously,

gtk40 4y ago

We use Google Groups for a non-profit I'm involved with and it works well. Not sure on a replacement that will work well for us yet.

shagie 4y ago
What are the requirements / key features of Google Groups that you use?
jmclnx 4y ago
This is one of many free replacements for google groups. I have been using that for years. https://www.newsgroupreviews.com/eternal-september.html https://www.newsgroupreviews.com/eternal-september.html
- pasc1878 4y ago
  Not exactly it does newsgroups only which is a small part of Goole groups. Most of Google Groups is mailing lists which can just be created unlike a newsgroup.
calvinmorrison 4y ago
Checkout Topicbox by Fastmail... fills the niche perfectly!
rexreed 4y ago
Is it for a mailing list or for a website archive? You can self-host a listserv on many shared hosting sites for pennies.
mercacona 4y ago
Check if your country has public-funded LISTSERV/Mailman/* instances. If not, I'll check https://gaggle.email https://gaggle.email

cauthon 4y ago

I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.

capableweb 4y ago
Hackers and spammers too. Famously bad security (which somehow got PHP got blamed for, rather than specific software) principles.
- amenghra 4y ago
  PHP got blamed for because it handed developers guns to shoot themselves in the foot with.
- cauthon 4y ago
  Yeah, I’m not a web dev, but I assumed there were one or more technical limitations that led to its decline. I liked the interface, and the familiarity when seemingly every small-to-medium forum online was built on it. Plus they were all scrapable. There’s a ton of information that’s hard or impossible to find now that these conversations are typically siloed in slack or discord.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  I remember how many mods for phpBB were installed by literally doing find/replaces on the source files. Absolutely insane we had people out there doing that who didn't know any PHP!
- Zak 4y ago
  In fairness, early PHP often made it much easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing while simultaneously targeting beginner web developers.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  While there are still forums using old software, and more importantly, not moderated, which are overrun by spam, surely this isn't the case for those that keep up ? (I'm also wondering how much field-specific registration questions help there, and what are the non-GAFAM alternatives to Captcha ?)

bushbaba 4y ago

Better it’s left up than killed off.

blahblah1234567 4y ago

[flagged]

scrollaway 4y ago
And anyone who comments on Google-related topics with the link to killedbygoogle is beating a dead horse... So tired of that argument.
- blahblah1234567 4y ago
  [flagged]
- coreyp_1 4y ago
  Actually, I didn't know about the site, so I'm glad that the comment was posted. It seems like a great resource for project idea prompts that can be taken, modified/customized/generalized/specialized into something new!
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    It's also mentioned and linked to in the second sentence of the article.
aidenn0 4y ago
My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between products that google started and killed and products that google bought and killed. The former can be a sign of healthy experimentation. The latter is just frustrating, particularly when Google paid a lot for the product in question. Groups at least partly came out of the Dejanews acquisition and seeing something purchased by a company that will be a poor steward is frustrating.
- amf12 4y ago
  > My only gripe with that is it doesn't differentiate between products that google started and killed and products that google bought and killed. Or products that were merged in other products [1], or which had newer versions [2]. [1] Google Bookmarks, Password Checkup Extension -> Chrome, etc. [2]: Nest Hub, Nexus Phones, OnHub.

jmclnx 4y ago

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 the abortion that is google news. Good riddance google groups, do not let the door hit you on the way out.

bpye 4y ago
If Google Groups is actually going to die would it not be worth scraping the history for at least some groups?
- chx 4y ago
  It would be so much nicer if someone from Google -- we know they are reading this forum could release the archive to Archive.org. Google doesn't do much with it, they removed Advanced Search so... why not?
  - zamnos 4y ago
    It's due to legal challenges, unfortunately, and as Manu Cornet's org chart depicts[1], this means that there just isn't the resources at Google to deal with it, nor is there the insurgent counter-culture to release it via torrent on 4chan. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6
nayroclade 4y ago
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 expanded the archive with contributions from other sources and worked to improve the search and posting interfaces. Yes, eventually they lost interest and it degraded into the current abomination, but that happened later.

jdfellow 4y ago

Google Groups performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver against USENET, by way of their acquisition of DejaNews and then implementing their own forum/mailing list interface on top if it. But, I wonder how many communities that are using Google Groups would be suitably served by falling back to USENET. I suppose it would require some updates to both NNTP server software to be easier to administer (if you want to go that route), and especially NNTP client readers to be more modern and user-friendly.

sixothree 4y ago
I have a theory related to google products - they can only exist if they can capture user data in a manner that is unique compared to their other products.
haolez 4y ago
The problem with USENET is spam. Moderation can be a burden. I suppose Google has some systems in place to mitigate this.
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  These days, it should be fairly easy to combat this. Everyone subscribes their messages. Client sw allows whitelisting the signatures. Whitelisted signatures can vouch for new signatures to be added. User can easily silence any signature. Messages that are hidden (because the signature is not whitelisted) are shown if a whitelisted message replies to them. I'm sure I didn't catch all the edge cases, but the main idea is that the system is distributed, built on reputation, and self-managed. Everyone is responsible for the content they receive.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    That's just bozo filters with a side of Web of Trust. It's been done. Bozo filters help with spam on the client side but don't do anything about spam on the server side. Servers still have to host everything because they can't know a priori what clients will want or not. Not that your idea is necessarily bad but it breaks a lot of the utility of Usenet to have whitelist based filtering. I can't know ahead of time I like your posts and want to whitelist you. I also don't want to have to "know a guy" to get involved in a group (via Web of Trust).

throw7 4y ago

I miss nntp. Gmane used to be my goto after nntp use fell off, but that died also (I get it though... the work to keep that working is not something I would want to do).

taviso 4y ago
I'm still a daily gmane user, thankfully you're mistaken and it's still alive and well, just nntp only (news.gmane.io)! I honestly don't know what I would do if it did die, it's such a large part of how I use the internet.
- throw7 4y ago
  I'll check things out again later. At some point I remember things getting unstable and not being able to post messages (this was when the original owner was giving up).
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    Gmane nntp access still works and I don't think has had any issues. The web interface to gmane has gone (due to self admitted errors by the original owner)

skim1420 4y ago

I don't disagree with the core point that long-horizon, FOSS communities should think twice before operating atop services like Google Groups. Also the particular quality atrophy and feature degradation sucks. Perhaps it's better framed to say that Groups is not prioritizing the particular users that the author is speaking on behalf of (ack, the monospace thing is a serious bug beyond FOSS communities). Google Groups and the shared infrastructure underneath is a critical piece of GSuite and GCP in many places, and I'd be very surprised if it ended up on the Killed By Google list.

sfc32 4y ago

Good!

ericand 4y ago

Or- great work to Google for maintaining a product that has waned in popularity and not killing it off!

proser 4y ago
Mentioned elsewhere, but Groups is a core part of their business offering. It's how lists and permissions get set up in lots of orgs using Google for enterprise email, docs, etc. View it as an extension of that and you can understand why consumer facing features seem stagnant.

modeless 4y ago

Google groups will never die because Google uses it to manage internal mailing lists.

cmh89 4y ago
Couldn't they just bring it internal? It must cost a good deal of money to keep it going, even if its not actively worked on.
- benhurmarcel 4y ago
  It's used heavily by many other companies that pay for Google Workspace too.
troyastorino 4y ago
Google groups is also the mechanism for defining groups for viewing/editing permissions, comments, calendar invites, etc across Google Workspace and for access permissions in GCP. That group definition aligns nicely with being a mailing list grouping. Those use cases are not going to go away, and I would expect Google will invest in them more (as Workspace has been an area that Google has significantly invested in, and I'd argue has been doing a good job).
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  I think this is a key point that many people don't realize. The ACL groups and mailing lists you create in Google Workspace are the same groups you see when you go to groups.google.com. This is absolutely integral to Google Workspace as you point out and isn't going anywhere.
  - urbandw311er 4y ago
    If this really is true then @AlbertCory’s comment earlier in this thread about there just being one guy working on Groups is absolutely terrifying.
4y ago

klodolph 4y ago

I would love to hear some recommendations for ways to build communities and discussion forums that are a bit more robust. Been seeing a minor resurgence of phpBB sites, as a reaction to the problems inherent in Discord and Reddit. When I research forum software, it seems like the space has more or less stagnated over the past 20 years, except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month). Some of the options I like in this space are newsgroups, majordomo mailing lists (with public archives), and phpBB. These pieces of software all had a long lifespan, and have some good qualities when it comes to archiving discussions and ease of use. Obviously, newsgroups are no longer a viable option. It does seem like we could do better these days, without outsourcing our communities to Reddit or Discord.

biorach 4y ago
> except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month). You can self-host Discourse I've set it up for a local community group. Was straighforward and not resource hungry for a small community
creatonez 4y ago
> except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month). No? Discourse is free like phpBB. Edit: Wow, they have really hidden the possibility for self-hosting from their website. It's still here, though - https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

davidw 4y ago

What's really crazy to me is that I'm on a local Google Group for the cycling community in the city I'm in. I somewhat regularly fish stuff out of my Gmail spam folder that went from Someone's personal gmail account -> Google Group -> My Gmail account. The message never left Google's infrastructure, and it's still being flagged as spam! They should have a lot of insight into those messages and be able to ascertain that it is not spam.

jeffbee 4y ago
It's crowd-sourced. If there are gmail users that have marked traffic from that group as spam, it is spam. Doing anything else would violate the neutrality of Google with respect to classification, and probably upset eurocrats of various flavors.
david_allison 4y ago
This also happens with Google-owned projects. A fair amount of Google Summer of Code communication goes to spam.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
em-bee 4y ago
a lot of gmail accounts are used to send spam, so having a gmail account as a source is not an indication of quality, and those need to be filtered just as much.
- davidw 4y ago
  You'd think that having some data about the sending account would allow them to be more confident. They should know that it's not a spam account - or if it is, act on it?
  - delfinom 4y ago
    The problem is gmail's infrastructure is most likely (a) built for speed and processing the billions of emails a day and (b) legacy, it probably has none of the access to Google's modern infrastructure such as rating gmail account "quality"

nightpool 4y ago

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 figure out email delivery? the article has a one-line tossed off aside at the end to say "Certainly self-hosted FOSS communities can die, but these are functions of community activity itself rather than the service they’re hosted on", but without considering that the absolute most crucial time for community resources to survive is through periods of lackluster or nonexistent community involvement. If you have a Google Group full of, say, formal methods programming experts, then it can spend 5 years fallow and still be chock-full of absolutely vital historical resources and even spring back into life as people start using it again for discussion. That sort of longevity just can't exist if someone stopped paying the hosting bills for their self-hosted TLA discourse forum 3 years in.

LegitShady 4y ago
nerd argument and fanfiction site spacebattles.com https://forums.spacebattles.com/history/ https://forums.spacebattles.com/history/ I'm sure there are lots of niche sites that have lasted as long. Thats just off the top of my head.
- rob 4y ago
  https://offtopic.com/ https://offtopic.com/ is still going and I believe it started in 2000?
- livrem 4y ago
  I still visit some web forums that has been online since the 90's. At least two still use the same ancient software that they have used since ~1995. One of those is shut down a few hours every night (US time) for "database maintenance". I find that more adorable than annoying. Used to hate web-forums. Usability is so bad compared to USENET. But now they are goldmines of probably unique content, and far better than Discord or Facebook Groups.

AlbertCory 4y ago

In about 2006 at Google, I met a guy who was working on Groups. He was the only one, and he was remote, even before that was a Thing. It's always been the thing no one wants to work on there. I'm pretty sure they could make it a permanent 20% project, if those ar still happening. I wouldn't be surprised if it already does get most of its love that way.

blitzar 4y ago
That person might still be there and they might still be the only one on the product.

scottfr 4y ago

Google Groups is heavily used within Google's ecosystem. Specifically it is: - a system for managing group-based access for Google Workspace users, e.g. share a Google Doc with a group to give all members access - a system for managing group-based access to Google Cloud Platform resources, e.g. share a BigQuery table with a Google Group to give all group members access to it. - a simple way for Google Workspace users to create shared email addresses. e.g. support@mycompany.com It serves these purposes quite well.

gtirloni 4y ago
Yes, Google Groups is used for much more than emails. That's not the point of the article though.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  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.
  - jks 4y ago
    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.
    - tylerhou 4y ago
      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.
    - lrem 4y ago
      I find it surprising that people use the groups webapp as a way to read the email. Isn't your email client more convenient? Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, but never beem responsible for anything close to Groups.

LastTrain 4y ago

So, how does one host a forum that will outlive the current ownership and members? What are the options out there? Create a collection at archive.org and do regular dumps there?

jdulay19 4y ago

As an outsider, why wouldn't anyone just migrate this to Slack/Discord/etc?

patja 4y ago
Slack is prohibitively expensive if you need more than 90 days of history, and Discord isn't very open or great for search.
shagie 4y ago
The question is "what type of interaction are you after?" Chat systems are good for the "I need help now" and "I want to chat..." but for some things a single message takes an hour or day or more thought to formulate a proper response. In those situations, the real time nature of chat causes discussions of a topic to become disjoint. USENET, email, forums and the like can have single topic threads / chains / posts where one topic is followed across days or weeks or months which is sometimes needed for hard problems.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

Been a long slow decline, it’s frustrating to watch it degrade. Imagine being an engineer assigned to this unloved thing; or worse, a product manager. Career death. https://groups.io https://groups.io is a good replacement for email lists. It’s mostly a for-pay product. https://www.usenetarchives.com/ https://www.usenetarchives.com/ is a good search engine for pre-2000 Usenet. Like Google’s old Deja archive which has been nearly unusable via Google Groups for years now.

itamarst 4y ago
https://groups.io https://groups.io is good for mailing lists, yes.

phneutral26 4y ago

[flagged]

qwertox 4y ago

I never understood how Discord can be seen as a replacement for mailing lists. To me it is the absolute chaos from a usability viewpoint and possibly a good place to chat about things which are not to be seen as persistent. To me the main alternative would be a Discourse-based platform, which can be seen as an evolution to the traditional PHP-based bulletin boards. I really hope that Google Groups doesn't shut down, but at this point I'm close to believing that Google care to disappoint. Then again, aren't a lot of Android development discussions taking place on Google Groups?

Alex3917 4y ago

FWIW I recently wrote a Discourse plug-in proposal to help communities migrate their existing content from Google Groups to Discourse, while giving members who prefer email the ability to fully participate from their inbox without any major changes from the current Google Groups experience. I didn't get a ton of interest so I haven't moved forward in productizing this, but all of the email parsing code is already written (and in production), so I can still ship a plug-in if this is something that other folks actually care about: https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposed-plugin-to-improve-reply-by-email-accuracy/252944 https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposed-plugin-to-improve-repl...

lacker 4y ago

I love open source but I think this analysis misses the real problem. In 2023, communities built purely on "mailing list" style tools are much less engaging and useful than communities that allow live discussions. For example, the author refers to the SMT-LIB google group. There has only been one message posted there in the last month! That isn't a "google groups" problem, it's a "nobody wants to use a mailing list any more" problem. I don't think using open source tools would have solved this issue. Mailman is open source and for a long time was the obvious open source alternative to Google Groups but hardly anyone is recommending that you migrate from Google Groups to Mailman! That said, there's nothing wrong with looking for an open source solution. It makes sense to try open source tools when you're talking about a community built around open source software. Zulip seems worth a try.

dalbasal 4y ago

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. Features invented over the last 30 years have value. Usenet can't be our YouTube or Facebook. But.. I refuse to believe open protocols got so much of the job done for so long, but the last mile requires a unicorn to platformize it. There aren't that many hurdles to taking social media back. Login/identity. HN demonstrates that this can be relatively simple. Hosting. Not quite as simple, apparently. Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway. There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again?

mschuster91 4y ago
> 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", or as we're seeing in the wake of the Russian invasion by enemy propaganda. > Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway. Nope. Reddit's various cesspools, from lolicon to the_donald [1], show that any platform needs centralized moderation lest it became overrun by any of the groups listed above. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Mastodon is social media, not a platform, and Gab (or Truth social), despite being bigger than all the other of its servers, haven't managed to "overrun" it.
- dalbasal 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Octokiddie 4y ago

> GitHub is wonderful now but fundamentally proprietary, same as Google Groups, and FOSS software forges like sourcehut are making great progress. It may be impossible to imagine now, but a similarly craptaculous outcome for GitHub should not be ruled out. Back when SourceForge was revered as the be-all, end-all of open source development, few could imagine a future in which the service just kept getting worse and worse.

altairprime 4y ago

Discussion forums are not a viable substitute for encoding solved problems into documentation. This will continue to be a new discovery each time a service shuts down. If a solution is not incorporated your effort’s formal documentation, then that solution will eventually be lost. Trying to shift the burden of documenting solutions from the project to the forum archives, whether hosted or outsourced, will eventually fail.

summerlight 4y ago

Not sure why it has a perception of being abandoned. IIRC, it still has a considerably larger team compared to other real dying products. Also it has a clear role inside the Google Workspace. It's obviously prioritizing enterprise users, but it doesn't necessarily mean public groups are being shut down anytime soon.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jedberg 4y ago

> 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". Maybe IRC and NNTP would get some great client improvements if a bunch of open source groups settled on it?

anthk 4y ago
If you want IM+videoconference+file transfers (and emojis), Jabber. Public places to discuss stuff, IRC. Decentralized fora, NNTP+TLS.
selfhoster11 4y ago
I'm a huge fan of decentralisation, but I am 100% not going back to IRC. I want the modern features too. Matrix seems to cover this.

londons_explore 4y ago

Google groups is widely used internally to Google. it isn't going away anytime soon.

Animats 4y ago

Does it still gateway to Usenet? Could people just use Usenet without Google?

pwg 4y ago
Yes. Either buy a low cost USENET account from a commercial provider, or sign up at http://www.eternal-september.org/ 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).
- Animats 4y ago
  Maybe all that's needed here is a better USENET client.
  - anthk 4y ago
    slrn it's fine. Killing SPAM it's very easy to do.

madmax108 4y ago

It's honestly scary for some of these old-school Google products that have become vast stores of knowledge. Besides Google Groups, I worry a lot about the future of Blogger/Blogspot. I personally have a blog that I have maintained from 2007-08 and I often worry about Google just wiping off a part of my internet presence (my own little corner of the web). Google has pretty much left Blogspot to die for better half of the last decade. And speaking unselfishly, I often find blogger/blogspot blogs on obscure tech topics (usually with the default blogspot template) and I worry how much info we'll just lose to the void if/when Google decides to pull the plug (even with a grace-period, I'm sure most folks wouldn't bother to move this data). Really shows the value of archival services on the internet and why we need to ensure they can function over time!

orcajerk 4y ago

[flagged]

zabzonk 4y ago

i used it to do tech support for my CSVFix foss software. it was free and worked ok - what more do you want? at least it lasted much longer than google code, which is where i used to host my foss projects. when that closed, i switched to bit bucket (mercurial user here) and then they dropped mercurial support. i sure can pick them!

p41nt 4y ago

I wish there was a modern email listserv for people to subscribe / unsubscribe and maybe manage posting permissions for. Using chat servers or forums is an extra barrier for people to overcome and prevents collaboration from a broader set of people. Mailgun kind of has a list service that works. But not an easy way for end users to self manage. Curious if anyone could recommend something that could be selfhosted or worth paying for?

debacle 4y ago

I just started using Google Groups and love it. Is it going by the wayside?

dsr_ 4y ago

https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ is a web forum. Which is also on Usenet/NNTP. Which is also a mailing list archive. And also an IRC bot. AGPL. https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

jordigh 4y ago
It's also blazingly fast. An awesome D app.

epaulson 4y ago

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.

bg24 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kazinator 4y ago

They should switch to a Usenet newsgroup. Then they could keep using the same awful web interface that they are used to, for the time being, and gradually start switch to NNTP-based newsreaders.

fuddle 4y ago

Nice to see the author created discussion threads on lobste.rs, Hacker News and r/programming

politician 4y ago

I disagree, Google Groups and Usenet are immortal now that they have been included into LLM training corpuses.

steren 4y ago

Google Groups actually received a very big UI refresh ~ 2 years ago. I bet that was a complete re-write of the UI stack, not something you see for a product which would have been left to die.

bloppe 4y ago

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, including mobility and longevity, if need be. But that's just a worst-case scenario. It would be surprising to have to solve these problems yourself.

bentley 4y ago
Realtime chat platforms like Matrix necessitate an entirely different sort of moderation compared to a traditional mailing list/forum-style community.

asah 4y ago

Groups for Business seems to be thriving and has many new features, especially for admins. (it's well integrated with free/consumer Groups, and I assume they use the same codebase, i.e. consumer Groups is just a tiny subset)

javajosh 4y ago

It's interesting to consider this genre, the "community website". The primary functions are chat, forums, maybe a wiki or a blog. So a "community website" is a union of all the modes people use to communicate on the web. Therefore the solution is going to be a curated compose.yml that runs best-in-class versions of each thing with baked-in identity configuration and its own strong community around data movement between processes. Imagine a website that helps users build their own compose.yml based on their choice of components, similar to https://start.spring.io/ https://start.spring.io/. However, even if you had this, the "exercise for the reader" will be substantial: get a domain name and a host, learn to admin linux and docker. Finally get the compose file and run it. And learn to troubleshoot each process, with its unique runtime and build, when things go wrong. This is a heavy investment, but probably worth it. Kind of like learning to work on your own car.

j2kun 4y ago

Weird because Google groups is heavily used internally at Google. Unless there's an internal replacement coming, I don't see how it could die.

dingosity 4y ago

If only there were a protocol for distribution of MIME messages across a distributed network of computers. Alas. We may never find a solution that is not tied to a specific vendor.

howard941 4y ago
NNTP?
- dingosity 4y ago
  yup.
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    How do you add a new group for your new project?
urbandw311er 4y ago
This is sarcasm right? The answer being SMTP and email.

rtkwe 4y ago

Every now and then I wonder with a twinge of fear how long until GMail makes it to the top of the list of potential axes on some mid level execs desk looking for cost centers to cut.

pentagrama 4y ago

5+ years ago I participate on a project who started a community from the ground up using a self-hosted https://discourse.org https://discourse.org. The experience was pretty great, the user experience in general is good, onboarding is straight forward, is mobile friendly, it has email and in-app notifications for replies, weekly digests and more. And you own the data! Later down the road, a chat platform was necessary too, and we use Telegram channels for that. I remember considering some OSS/Self-Hosted options for that but Telegram was really easy and the trade-off was worth it.

thestepafter 4y ago

Is anyone else experiencing where they have a paid Google business subscription for Gmail, Drive, etc and receive emails about posts to their Google group but even as an admin you are unable to access the content in the links? I never setup Google groups for my company but I receive an alert every time a spammer posts something. There has been no response from Google support on this.

sideproject 4y ago

For community forums and tools somewhat similar to Google Groups, I've recently launched HN+ https://www.hn.plus https://www.hn.plus I've always wanted to create my own HN clone and use it for myself. Yes, there are many many forum tools out there :)

2-718-281-828 4y ago

Google acts like it's suffering from ADHD.

Blackthorn 4y ago

Better it goes untouched than they try to "improve" it like what happened with the YouTube Music migration.

jen20 4y ago

I dread seeing an answer on a google group past about 6pm, since the CSS for dark mode is completely broken…

tracker1 4y ago

Usenet/NNTP is the way... Although most text/discussion groups are long dead, I think it's still a good idea in general. The move away from this towards email lists and Google Groups in the first place is/was IMO problematic. Much like moves away from IRC.

bentt 4y ago

This is where Academia should be jumping in to provide something open and backed with endowment money.

dakial1 4y ago

Wouldn't this be a valid use case for web3? As a decentralized group will exist as long as there are active nodes(users?), no need to depend on the goodwill of 1 sole host.