12 ms·

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 ev

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.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    xenforo that spacebattles is based on seems pretty good, but it appears to be a package deal with hosting (which I suppose funds its development). https://xenforo.com/purchase/ https://xenforo.com/purchase/ edit: found a license only page: https://xenforo.com/purchase/#licenses https://xenforo.com/purchase/#licenses but it seems you only get 1 year of updates for the $160, and then you have to pay the fee again, so even if its lifetime use you will probably want to continue to pay for security or whatever else updates.
golergka 4y ago
> Google Groups has survived 22 years. How many self-hosted Discourse forums can say the same? Initial release August 26, 2014 (8 years ago)[1] [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software))
spacedcowboy 4y ago
AtariAge.com[1] - first created in 1988, or 25 years ago. Run by some bloke on the internet. The problem for Google Groups is that no-one can perf-farm it any more, which is the sole reason for projects to survive at Google... 1: https://atariage.com/about.php https://atariage.com/about.php
- pdxandi 4y ago
  Just a note that 1988 was, gulp, 35 years ago.
  - zikduruqe 4y ago
    Just a note, Star Wars was released closer to World War 2, than today's date. Makes you feel really old.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      1977-1945=32 2023-1977=46 2023-32=1991 Quite a bit closer! That’s an interesting note, given that the Tie/X-wing fights were heavily inspired by WW2 dogfights, right? Can you imagine something that draws on the Gulf War similarly? It just seems wrong, too proximate to pull out purely aesthetic themes.
      - coliveira 4y ago
        WW2 had an immense importance in the minds of people who lived it. Gulf War... who even cares about it, except for the ones involved? Many people don't even remember that.
        johannes1234321 4y ago
        Which of the gulfwars are you even talking about? - Even Korea and Vietnam, which were big and had quite some cultural impact, are more and more forgotten.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and figure out email delivery? Absolutely not. Which is why it's distressing that Google Groups seems to be getting less reliable as a listserv, I don't want to do it myself.
ryanwhitney 4y ago
Yahoo! Groups lasted 19 years. I co-admin a large group that had to find a new home when it was killed off. We went to a third party (groups.io) that accepts money in exchange for services. Will that have longevity? No idea, but it's at least preferable to trusting [insert big tech co]'s benevolence in keeping a service (that they seemingly don't care about) running.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Money is but one piece to ensure longevity. How many people even work at groups.io? What's their business continuity plans in case the founder or someone critical to the team dies, either due to old age or some sort of tragedy? Or becomes tired of running it? I'm not convinced it's preferable - people get old and tired of running a thing, or undergo some big life event that changes their priorities, and it's so tiresome to find a successor. Groups.io doesn't have the kind of transparency for me to trust in its longevity. (I am in a group or two hosted there though.) Meanwhile, large tech can keep something running well past the initial creator's interest as waned. Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Google 20 years after they founded it, but I doubt they've had the same passion for new algorithms to improve Internet search for far longer. Despite that, Google is going to be around for a long time. Can you say that about groups.io? I don't even know who the CEO is or where the company is based. In the case of google groups, the important thing to realize is that Google is from an older era of the Internet, when people used mailing lists to keep in touch and wrote long form posts rather than pictures on Instagram. So dropping support for mailing lists simply would not work with the current company culture, and something deep ingrained into a company's culture is difficult to change, especially as new employess get steeped into that culture. I'm not going to deny the idea that Google Groups it's been "left to die", but I'd expect to see a facelift and a upgrade to Google Groups long before it dies, simply because it's an important dogfood product.
  - ryanwhitney 4y ago
    Groups.io was founded by Mark Fletcher[0], who in '97 started the mailing list service that Yahoo! eventually bought and turned into their Groups product. They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1]. Nonetheless, they're small and one might guess there's a high bus factor here. (Sorry Mark!) I think it's a toss up either way. I hadn't seen talk of Google Groups being internally significant until this thread, but they've burned enough similar products that it was barely a consideration for me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fletcher_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fletcher_(businessman) [1] https://groups.io/g/updates/topics https://groups.io/g/updates/topics
micromacrofoot 4y ago
The Straight Dope has threads on their forum (which at some point switched to Discourse) from 1999. So given that you consistently have access to your own data I don't see why a dedicated webmaster couldn't keep a forum active for a significantly longer time than you can trust Google to keep any product alive. Is it possible to export data from Google Groups? If not then longevity isn't the right question, they will not keep it active forever.
- efreak 4y ago
  Because it requires a dedicated webmaster.
Scoundreller 4y ago
Arstechnica forums have been going on since 98 or so. But they had that Conde Nast money early on. What drives me bonkers is when newspapers just wipe out their historical comments sections. Like… archiving people’s thoughts is supposed to be what you do!
- webtv-user 4y ago
  Thoughts… That is a generous term to describe what you'd find in newspaper sites' comment sections!
corobo 4y ago
My account at gtaforums.com turned 20 this year, cripes. Site itself looks to be 21 years old. SomethingAwful has been around longer I'm pretty sure too.
- sli 4y ago
  Albino Balcksheep turned 24 this past January and is still going. Newgrounds will turn 28 this July. Feels like yesterday, still.
  - corobo 4y ago
    Right! I remember clearly when I registered on GTAF too. I'd discovered a bug/trick that allowed you to store a helicopter in a garage (I want to say in GTA 3?) and was itching to tell someone about it. Of course it was already a known thing on the internet, but that was the start of my online career. From there I ended up on IRC and in there I wanted to make a bot, so I learned mIRCScript. Spin on a couple years and I was helping run the IRC network, which got me into sysadmin stuff. From that rattling off how email works got me my first real tech job. "How in-depth do you want me to go?" "Uhh.. as far as you can" I got the job offer before I'd finished with the DNS lookups haha.
logifail 4y ago
> Google Groups has survived 22 years [..] Well that prompted me to check, and it seems my primary domain name, and hence my email address[es], turn 23 years old this year! Hat tip to the person who prompted me - waaay back in 2000 - to register it.
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  I've had mine since 2007, which still feels like a long time to me. I was so young then ...
bitL 4y ago
Google Groups basically destroyed all Usenet competitors and now is going belly up itself, likely taking down a large portion of computing history with itself.
- TylerE 4y ago
  The warezers killed usenet. They made it completely uneconomical for ISPs to run server.
  - tracker1 4y ago
    Usenet was generally pretty good at sticking to binaries for the warez and copyright content. Hosting the text-only groups was not that intensive, especially by today's standards. I think the worst problem was sites that just didn't care... I spent a day reporting spam posts to the admins of origin servers, and they just didn't care at all. Today, it's far less of an issue.. but if Usenet got popular again, the spammers would get back into it. I can only imagine how much spam gets removed/filtered on this site.
bbarn 4y ago
Not only that, but people continue to evolve the way they have (no pun intended) discourse. Email used to be the thing professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each other. I now use email effectively only for delivery confirmations and log in verifications. I haven't had a personal email in over a year I'd guess. People text, they whatsapp, they messenger, they telegram, but no one emails. The same with groups. A forum I have been on for decades has recently started a poll with the admins and power users of "Should we just close the forum since all the good stuff is on discord anyway". Look at Slack's organic growth - it was great, people just started it and basically forced adoption on companies. Not so much today, because things evolved again. Discord is doing the same - people just start one, doesn't have to be official, then ultimately, it becomes official. But you know, if your FOSS community can only survive with one specific tool, is it really a community?
- evouga 4y ago
  “no one emails”: that hasn’t been my experience or observation at all. Email remains by far the most common channel for professional communication. Sure, my coworkers will send me Slack DMs. Random professional acquaintances do not.
  - wyclif 4y ago
    To me, email is still the killer app. It upsets me that it is losing its power as an open protocol as corporations try to cannibalize it.
- spacechild1 4y ago
  > Email used to be the thing professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each other. I now use email effectively only for delivery confirmations and log in verifications. Be careful with extrapolating from you personal experience. Pretty much all of my professional communication happens over e-mail. (I wouldn't even know what to use instead.) I am sure that is still true for many people.
vasco 4y ago
I wish Discourse never happened to the internet. What a regression from phpbb in so many respects when that's the thing they set out to improve.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I mean, it seemed objectively great when I heard about it for the first time, but then actually using it feels so icky that I’m deliberately looking for alternatives.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Yeah, so why is that ? I'm not using it much, IIRC one issue is that it doesn't work if JavaScript is disabled, right ?
pbreit 4y ago
The "new" web UI is positively awful. The messages list is unreadable.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
radiojasper 4y ago
> or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and figure out email delivery? Nah, I'd just use Discord. Code rendering: check. With different syntax highlighting per language even. Discussion: check. Forums: check. Photo galleries: check. Email notifications: check. Free: check.
- MonaroVXR 4y ago
  But not searchable on internet
thrashh 4y ago
Honestly usually a forum dies because the community itself died first and no one cares about the thing anymore. Google Groups may have lasted this long but as far as I’m concerned, it already died long ago and there was no reason to even go to it anymore. There are still forums that out there that have survived two decades or more because their community is still alive. And keeping a community alive is not a technical matter.
- dakial1 4y ago
  Here is not the group dying, but the underlying platform that is dying because its maintainer (Google) lost interest in the business. So the active groups that are left there need to move to somewhere new (and risk losing all their data/history in the process)

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.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  xenforo that spacebattles is based on seems pretty good, but it appears to be a package deal with hosting (which I suppose funds its development). https://xenforo.com/purchase/ https://xenforo.com/purchase/ edit: found a license only page: https://xenforo.com/purchase/#licenses https://xenforo.com/purchase/#licenses but it seems you only get 1 year of updates for the $160, and then you have to pay the fee again, so even if its lifetime use you will probably want to continue to pay for security or whatever else updates.

golergka 4y ago

> Google Groups has survived 22 years. How many self-hosted Discourse forums can say the same? Initial release August 26, 2014 (8 years ago)[1] [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software))

spacedcowboy 4y ago

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

pdxandi 4y ago
Just a note that 1988 was, gulp, 35 years ago.
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  Just a note, Star Wars was released closer to World War 2, than today's date. Makes you feel really old.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    1977-1945=32 2023-1977=46 2023-32=1991 Quite a bit closer! That’s an interesting note, given that the Tie/X-wing fights were heavily inspired by WW2 dogfights, right? Can you imagine something that draws on the Gulf War similarly? It just seems wrong, too proximate to pull out purely aesthetic themes.
    - coliveira 4y ago
      WW2 had an immense importance in the minds of people who lived it. Gulf War... who even cares about it, except for the ones involved? Many people don't even remember that.
      - johannes1234321 4y ago
        Which of the gulfwars are you even talking about? - Even Korea and Vietnam, which were big and had quite some cultural impact, are more and more forgotten.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and figure out email delivery? Absolutely not. Which is why it's distressing that Google Groups seems to be getting less reliable as a listserv, I don't want to do it myself.

ryanwhitney 4y ago

Yahoo! Groups lasted 19 years. I co-admin a large group that had to find a new home when it was killed off. We went to a third party (groups.io) that accepts money in exchange for services. Will that have longevity? No idea, but it's at least preferable to trusting [insert big tech co]'s benevolence in keeping a service (that they seemingly don't care about) running.

zamnos 4y ago
Money is but one piece to ensure longevity. How many people even work at groups.io? What's their business continuity plans in case the founder or someone critical to the team dies, either due to old age or some sort of tragedy? Or becomes tired of running it? I'm not convinced it's preferable - people get old and tired of running a thing, or undergo some big life event that changes their priorities, and it's so tiresome to find a successor. Groups.io doesn't have the kind of transparency for me to trust in its longevity. (I am in a group or two hosted there though.) Meanwhile, large tech can keep something running well past the initial creator's interest as waned. Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Google 20 years after they founded it, but I doubt they've had the same passion for new algorithms to improve Internet search for far longer. Despite that, Google is going to be around for a long time. Can you say that about groups.io? I don't even know who the CEO is or where the company is based. In the case of google groups, the important thing to realize is that Google is from an older era of the Internet, when people used mailing lists to keep in touch and wrote long form posts rather than pictures on Instagram. So dropping support for mailing lists simply would not work with the current company culture, and something deep ingrained into a company's culture is difficult to change, especially as new employess get steeped into that culture. I'm not going to deny the idea that Google Groups it's been "left to die", but I'd expect to see a facelift and a upgrade to Google Groups long before it dies, simply because it's an important dogfood product.
- ryanwhitney 4y ago
  Groups.io was founded by Mark Fletcher[0], who in '97 started the mailing list service that Yahoo! eventually bought and turned into their Groups product. They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1]. Nonetheless, they're small and one might guess there's a high bus factor here. (Sorry Mark!) I think it's a toss up either way. I hadn't seen talk of Google Groups being internally significant until this thread, but they've burned enough similar products that it was barely a consideration for me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fletcher_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fletcher_(businessman) [1] https://groups.io/g/updates/topics https://groups.io/g/updates/topics

micromacrofoot 4y ago

The Straight Dope has threads on their forum (which at some point switched to Discourse) from 1999. So given that you consistently have access to your own data I don't see why a dedicated webmaster couldn't keep a forum active for a significantly longer time than you can trust Google to keep any product alive. Is it possible to export data from Google Groups? If not then longevity isn't the right question, they will not keep it active forever.

efreak 4y ago
Because it requires a dedicated webmaster.

Scoundreller 4y ago

Arstechnica forums have been going on since 98 or so. But they had that Conde Nast money early on. What drives me bonkers is when newspapers just wipe out their historical comments sections. Like… archiving people’s thoughts is supposed to be what you do!

webtv-user 4y ago
Thoughts… That is a generous term to describe what you'd find in newspaper sites' comment sections!

corobo 4y ago

My account at gtaforums.com turned 20 this year, cripes. Site itself looks to be 21 years old. SomethingAwful has been around longer I'm pretty sure too.

sli 4y ago
Albino Balcksheep turned 24 this past January and is still going. Newgrounds will turn 28 this July. Feels like yesterday, still.
- corobo 4y ago
  Right! I remember clearly when I registered on GTAF too. I'd discovered a bug/trick that allowed you to store a helicopter in a garage (I want to say in GTA 3?) and was itching to tell someone about it. Of course it was already a known thing on the internet, but that was the start of my online career. From there I ended up on IRC and in there I wanted to make a bot, so I learned mIRCScript. Spin on a couple years and I was helping run the IRC network, which got me into sysadmin stuff. From that rattling off how email works got me my first real tech job. "How in-depth do you want me to go?" "Uhh.. as far as you can" I got the job offer before I'd finished with the DNS lookups haha.

logifail 4y ago

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

mrtranscendence 4y ago
I've had mine since 2007, which still feels like a long time to me. I was so young then ...

bitL 4y ago

Google Groups basically destroyed all Usenet competitors and now is going belly up itself, likely taking down a large portion of computing history with itself.

TylerE 4y ago
The warezers killed usenet. They made it completely uneconomical for ISPs to run server.
- tracker1 4y ago
  Usenet was generally pretty good at sticking to binaries for the warez and copyright content. Hosting the text-only groups was not that intensive, especially by today's standards. I think the worst problem was sites that just didn't care... I spent a day reporting spam posts to the admins of origin servers, and they just didn't care at all. Today, it's far less of an issue.. but if Usenet got popular again, the spammers would get back into it. I can only imagine how much spam gets removed/filtered on this site.

bbarn 4y ago

Not only that, but people continue to evolve the way they have (no pun intended) discourse. Email used to be the thing professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each other. I now use email effectively only for delivery confirmations and log in verifications. I haven't had a personal email in over a year I'd guess. People text, they whatsapp, they messenger, they telegram, but no one emails. The same with groups. A forum I have been on for decades has recently started a poll with the admins and power users of "Should we just close the forum since all the good stuff is on discord anyway". Look at Slack's organic growth - it was great, people just started it and basically forced adoption on companies. Not so much today, because things evolved again. Discord is doing the same - people just start one, doesn't have to be official, then ultimately, it becomes official. But you know, if your FOSS community can only survive with one specific tool, is it really a community?

evouga 4y ago
“no one emails”: that hasn’t been my experience or observation at all. Email remains by far the most common channel for professional communication. Sure, my coworkers will send me Slack DMs. Random professional acquaintances do not.
- wyclif 4y ago
  To me, email is still the killer app. It upsets me that it is losing its power as an open protocol as corporations try to cannibalize it.
spacechild1 4y ago
> Email used to be the thing professionals and even friends out of reach did to message each other. I now use email effectively only for delivery confirmations and log in verifications. Be careful with extrapolating from you personal experience. Pretty much all of my professional communication happens over e-mail. (I wouldn't even know what to use instead.) I am sure that is still true for many people.

vasco 4y ago

I wish Discourse never happened to the internet. What a regression from phpbb in so many respects when that's the thing they set out to improve.

Aeolun 4y ago
I mean, it seemed objectively great when I heard about it for the first time, but then actually using it feels so icky that I’m deliberately looking for alternatives.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Yeah, so why is that ? I'm not using it much, IIRC one issue is that it doesn't work if JavaScript is disabled, right ?

pbreit 4y ago

The "new" web UI is positively awful. The messages list is unreadable.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

radiojasper 4y ago

> or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and figure out email delivery? Nah, I'd just use Discord. Code rendering: check. With different syntax highlighting per language even. Discussion: check. Forums: check. Photo galleries: check. Email notifications: check. Free: check.

MonaroVXR 4y ago
But not searchable on internet

thrashh 4y ago

Honestly usually a forum dies because the community itself died first and no one cares about the thing anymore. Google Groups may have lasted this long but as far as I’m concerned, it already died long ago and there was no reason to even go to it anymore. There are still forums that out there that have survived two decades or more because their community is still alive. And keeping a community alive is not a technical matter.

dakial1 4y ago
Here is not the group dying, but the underlying platform that is dying because its maintainer (Google) lost interest in the business. So the active groups that are left there need to move to somewhere new (and risk losing all their data/history in the process)