13 ms·

Looming Groupocalypse: The Google Groupsspaggheddon Cometh

44 points by SyberShock 3y ago

DeathArrow 3y ago
Usenet is not controlled by a big corporation, that is what threatens its existence. You didn't need Meta or X or Instagram to exchange information. Algorithms didn't decide what you get to see or not. You weren't forced to consume large amounts of ads and you weren't tracked. This is very bad! :) Can we, somehow, revive Usenet or build a better version of it?
- gerikson 3y ago
  The role of Usenet now is filled by the fediverse.
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    It's filled (sadly) by Reddit and not much else. I hope the fediverse somehow wins but it doesn't look likely any time soon
    - blashyrk 3y ago
      I tried Lemmy for a bit and found it to be nothing more than a tiny Reddit clone. And I don't mean just the software aspect of it, rather the content and moderation.
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        Wasn't being a Reddit clone the point though?
        gerikson 3y ago
        Reddit recreated the social structure of Usenet. Shared infrastructure, but the subreddits managed themselves. Topics, threads... all similar to Usenet. Better multimedia support, of course. Even the phenomenon of anonymous posters (because accounts didn't require an email for a long time), flames, crossposting... all very like usenet.
        rightbyte 3y ago
        Usenet did not have moderators right? Reddit was more of a "run-a-forum as a service". But the Big Drama made it clear that it's Reddit's forum, not yours. Bait and switch.
        gerikson 3y ago
        Usenet did have moderation, as per this Reddit post (ironically): https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/m2dtcg/usenet_moderation_process/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/m2dtcg/us... Usenet preceded modern social media so the current discussions about who owns content didn't apply. Reddit was remarkably open in the beginning. Anon accounts, light moderation, open API... it's when they decided to try to extract more value that it became really shitty.
        kergonath 3y ago
        > Usenet did not have moderators right? It depends on the newsgroup. Some of them did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup
        SyberShock 3y ago
        There are still active, moderated newsgroups. The majority of them have dried up, but some are still relevant.
        mcv 3y ago
        The one thing Reddit didn't copy from usenet was the decentralisation. In that sense, I guess Lemmy is a step forward.
        fluidcruft 3y ago
        Discoverability and fragmentation seem to be the problems on Lemmy. Groups are small (not really a problem, the smaller subreddits with active and engaged people are better IMHO) but it's really difficult and high-effort for groups to form. Reddit did seem to have that part working well. I think people have gone into Discord (which sucks/I cannot stand).
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I'm not aware of anything that fills the role that Usenet filled. What does this? I'd be very interested in such a thing.
- SyberShock 3y ago
  People are working on this. In particular Retro Guy has one very good web front end that is really the only viable replacement for Google Groups at this point. Look for Rocksolid Light (rslight) on gitlab. The source code is here: https://gitlab.com/rslight-public/rocksolid-light https://gitlab.com/rslight-public/rocksolid-light The live demo site is here: https://news.novabbs.org/rocksolid/index.php https://news.novabbs.org/rocksolid/index.php It has a retro look on purpose. There are several themes included and it is really easy to create a new theme CSS file. You can run a peer to carry text groups on a raspberry pi or a cheap VPS. Visit the rocksolid.* hierarchy on Usenet if you have questions about running a peer. Please don't ask questions about Rocksolid here on HN, as that would not benefit the people learning in the newsgroups. Disclosure: I am not the maintainer of Rocksolid Light and I am not promoting my own product. I just like the software and I think the maintainer has the right ideas and right attitude of retro-styled usability in his project.
ipsum2 3y ago
The title could be misconstrued that Google groups is going to be discontinued. It won't be for a long time, simply because Google heavily relies on it internally.
- slimsag 3y ago
  They killed Google Code in 2016, and Google Code Search in 2012. Internally those types of products still exist, just not for public use. I see no reason Google groups could not also be killed for any public use.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. As far as I understand the internally available equivalents are entirely different products than what was publicly available, and have never been made public themselves.
  - ipsum2 3y ago
    Nope, those are entirely different codebases.
RileyJames 3y ago
I’ve heard of Usenet, but never used it. It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents, but I don’t get the vibe that’s the primary use case. What can I do with Usenet? The internet has become so boring, I’d be open to exploring something else, but I’ve got no idea what Usenet is.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  I'm open to correction, but I believe it's essentially a bunch of email lists. You can post to rec.games.roguelike.angband, your message will go to a server somewhere (theoretically, to every Usenet provider), and people who want to discuss, or read discussion of, Angband, can ask that server for the set of messages associated with rec.games.roguelike.angband. So email, if you sent mail to topics rather than to recipients.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    I've always assumed (never looked into it) that the protocol itself has little in common with SMTP. But the constraints of text-only messages (email before html formatting took hold), email address as user ID and client software that used the same UI for both (Netscape Navigator!) certainly made it feel like very much the same thing. Mailing lists, but more federated than irc. One difference to mailing lists of more recent times, besides technological differences, is that there was more of a sense of shared culture across groups. Groups certainly differed (some topics might have even had parallel groups in regular and in alt.* hierarchies?), but not even remotely as much as mailing lists differ. Certainly more free for all babble (because it was) than the more moderated or even announcement-only end of the mailing list spectrum that is enabled by their centralised nature.
  - SyberShock 3y ago
    Usenet runs on the NNTP protocol. NNTP stands for "Network News Transfer Protocol." It is not a mailing list but many mailing list operators mirror their mailing lists in a NNTP newsgroup. This is done with a mail-to-news gateway script. Usenet is typically accessed with a news reader application like Thunderbird. Thunderbird is not just a email client. It is also a news client that allows you to subscribe to and post to newsgroups.
fmajid 3y ago
I stopped using Usenet a long time ago but the Google Usenet archive has posts of mine from the 90s that are not in Henry Spencer’s archive. Is someone’s backing up Google’s archive or should I start scraping their pages to have a backup?
- BryantD 3y ago
  Note https://archive.org/details/usenet?tab=collection https://archive.org/details/usenet?tab=collection -- I haven't reviewed it so I don't have a take on how complete it is, but the archive team there tends to be fairly completist.
  - iggldiggl 3y ago
    uk.railway archives from that collection only go back into the early 2000s, whereas I know Google had posts going back into the 90s. (But unfortunately Google is currently blocking access on account of too much spam, maybe facilitated by Google Groups in the first place…)
thatoneguy 3y ago
I met my first girlfriend on Usenet back in the mid-90s. She sent me a mixtape I still have and her writing Bush(x) next to some of the Bush songs confused me for many years. Lots of college-aged people were around Usenet for help, advice and just listen to me. Same goes for IRC. I don't know if I'd be here if it wasn't for the online mentorship of slightly older strangers keeping me going until I found IRL friends and graduated from the internet. Anyhow, Google should release the original DejaNews archive to the public minus whatever posts people have told them to remove over the years. I've been told it arrived there on a handful of DVDs, so it's not exactly a lot of data in 2024.
- aidenscott2016 3y ago
  What does bush x mean?
  - patcon 3y ago
    She was Canadian. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_(Canadian_band)#Name_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_(Canadian_band)#Name_di...
    - hoosieree 3y ago
      Unexpectedly wholesome resolution to the name dispute!
      - Apocryphon 3y ago
        Seems like a Canadian artist thing to do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_Above_1979#You're_a_Woman,_I'm_a_Machine_and_break_up_(2004–2006) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_Above_1979#You're_a...
kdwikzncba 3y ago
[dead]
fergie 3y ago
Practical question: How do you browse and search in mailing lists without Google Groups?
- wakeupcall 3y ago
  Open mailing lists often have public archives, for example https://www.mail-archive.com/ https://www.mail-archive.com/. Many lists are subscribed to multiple public archives. Those archives are often searchable on their own platforms, and are indexed by regular search engines too. Now about mailing lists created using the google "groups" platform itself, is a different story. Does google index it's own group archives? No idea. Those were _already_ horrible to look at before and I've subscribed most of the ones I follow to other public archives to get something usable.
- layer8 3y ago
  Traditionally if you're subscribed to a mailing list you'd basically have your own local archive of it and use your email client for search. If you wanted to incorporate messages from before you joined the list, you'd ask some old-timer to send you their mbox archive. Public/centralized archives as the sibling notes became common at some point, though usability is generally worse than with an email client (at least the power-user ones).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
splitbrain 3y ago
Wait. I'm confused. Google Groups was still interfacing with the Usenet? In a way that one could post to Usenet via Google Groups? I never knew that! I thought they were only hosting a read-only archive based on what they acquired with DejaNews. And I seem to recall a post about that having been discontinued... So this was somehow secretly all still alive? Damn.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  Even so… now you cant even read it. Say goodbye to many historic messages like Linus announcing his Kernel, and many dead links on the web.
philip1209 3y ago
They erase their own history: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java/c/aSPAJO05LIU/m/ushhUIQQ-ogJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java/c/aSPAJO05LIU/m/u...
- Thorrez 3y ago
  From the top of the page: >Viewing and searching of historical data will still be supported as it is done today. Disclosure: I work at Google (or at least I hope I still do), but not on this.
SyberShock 3y ago
Tuesday, September 11088, 1993 Usenet is dead. Usenet has always been dead. Usenet is dying. Usenet is always dying. Live with it. Long live Usenet! Google Groups is pulling the plug on Usenet. But the Eternal September will not end ...
- drvdevd 3y ago
  > Whether February 22, 2024 comes in like a lion or a lamb, that day will always be September 11131, 1993. > And one thing is sure: If September is eternal, then Usenet is eternal, too. Amazing. Love this.

44 points by SyberShock 3y ago

Usenet is not controlled by a big corporation, that is what threatens its existence. You didn't need Meta or X or Instagram to exchange information. Algorithms didn't decide what you get to see or not. You weren't forced to consume large amounts of ads and you weren't tracked. This is very bad! :) Can we, somehow, revive Usenet or build a better version of it?

gerikson 3y ago
The role of Usenet now is filled by the fediverse.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  It's filled (sadly) by Reddit and not much else. I hope the fediverse somehow wins but it doesn't look likely any time soon
  - blashyrk 3y ago
    I tried Lemmy for a bit and found it to be nothing more than a tiny Reddit clone. And I don't mean just the software aspect of it, rather the content and moderation.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Wasn't being a Reddit clone the point though?
      - gerikson 3y ago
        Reddit recreated the social structure of Usenet. Shared infrastructure, but the subreddits managed themselves. Topics, threads... all similar to Usenet. Better multimedia support, of course. Even the phenomenon of anonymous posters (because accounts didn't require an email for a long time), flames, crossposting... all very like usenet.
        rightbyte 3y ago
        Usenet did not have moderators right? Reddit was more of a "run-a-forum as a service". But the Big Drama made it clear that it's Reddit's forum, not yours. Bait and switch.
        gerikson 3y ago
        Usenet did have moderation, as per this Reddit post (ironically): https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/m2dtcg/usenet_moderation_process/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/m2dtcg/us... Usenet preceded modern social media so the current discussions about who owns content didn't apply. Reddit was remarkably open in the beginning. Anon accounts, light moderation, open API... it's when they decided to try to extract more value that it became really shitty.
        kergonath 3y ago
        > Usenet did not have moderators right? It depends on the newsgroup. Some of them did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup
        SyberShock 3y ago
        There are still active, moderated newsgroups. The majority of them have dried up, but some are still relevant.
        mcv 3y ago
        The one thing Reddit didn't copy from usenet was the decentralisation. In that sense, I guess Lemmy is a step forward.
      - fluidcruft 3y ago
        Discoverability and fragmentation seem to be the problems on Lemmy. Groups are small (not really a problem, the smaller subreddits with active and engaged people are better IMHO) but it's really difficult and high-effort for groups to form. Reddit did seem to have that part working well. I think people have gone into Discord (which sucks/I cannot stand).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I'm not aware of anything that fills the role that Usenet filled. What does this? I'd be very interested in such a thing.
SyberShock 3y ago
People are working on this. In particular Retro Guy has one very good web front end that is really the only viable replacement for Google Groups at this point. Look for Rocksolid Light (rslight) on gitlab. The source code is here: https://gitlab.com/rslight-public/rocksolid-light https://gitlab.com/rslight-public/rocksolid-light The live demo site is here: https://news.novabbs.org/rocksolid/index.php https://news.novabbs.org/rocksolid/index.php It has a retro look on purpose. There are several themes included and it is really easy to create a new theme CSS file. You can run a peer to carry text groups on a raspberry pi or a cheap VPS. Visit the rocksolid.* hierarchy on Usenet if you have questions about running a peer. Please don't ask questions about Rocksolid here on HN, as that would not benefit the people learning in the newsgroups. Disclosure: I am not the maintainer of Rocksolid Light and I am not promoting my own product. I just like the software and I think the maintainer has the right ideas and right attitude of retro-styled usability in his project.

ipsum2 3y ago

The title could be misconstrued that Google groups is going to be discontinued. It won't be for a long time, simply because Google heavily relies on it internally.

slimsag 3y ago
They killed Google Code in 2016, and Google Code Search in 2012. Internally those types of products still exist, just not for public use. I see no reason Google groups could not also be killed for any public use.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. As far as I understand the internally available equivalents are entirely different products than what was publicly available, and have never been made public themselves.
- ipsum2 3y ago
  Nope, those are entirely different codebases.

RileyJames 3y ago

I’ve heard of Usenet, but never used it. It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents, but I don’t get the vibe that’s the primary use case. What can I do with Usenet? The internet has become so boring, I’d be open to exploring something else, but I’ve got no idea what Usenet is.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
I'm open to correction, but I believe it's essentially a bunch of email lists. You can post to rec.games.roguelike.angband, your message will go to a server somewhere (theoretically, to every Usenet provider), and people who want to discuss, or read discussion of, Angband, can ask that server for the set of messages associated with rec.games.roguelike.angband. So email, if you sent mail to topics rather than to recipients.
- usrusr 3y ago
  I've always assumed (never looked into it) that the protocol itself has little in common with SMTP. But the constraints of text-only messages (email before html formatting took hold), email address as user ID and client software that used the same UI for both (Netscape Navigator!) certainly made it feel like very much the same thing. Mailing lists, but more federated than irc. One difference to mailing lists of more recent times, besides technological differences, is that there was more of a sense of shared culture across groups. Groups certainly differed (some topics might have even had parallel groups in regular and in alt.* hierarchies?), but not even remotely as much as mailing lists differ. Certainly more free for all babble (because it was) than the more moderated or even announcement-only end of the mailing list spectrum that is enabled by their centralised nature.
- SyberShock 3y ago
  Usenet runs on the NNTP protocol. NNTP stands for "Network News Transfer Protocol." It is not a mailing list but many mailing list operators mirror their mailing lists in a NNTP newsgroup. This is done with a mail-to-news gateway script. Usenet is typically accessed with a news reader application like Thunderbird. Thunderbird is not just a email client. It is also a news client that allows you to subscribe to and post to newsgroups.

fmajid 3y ago

I stopped using Usenet a long time ago but the Google Usenet archive has posts of mine from the 90s that are not in Henry Spencer’s archive. Is someone’s backing up Google’s archive or should I start scraping their pages to have a backup?

BryantD 3y ago
Note https://archive.org/details/usenet?tab=collection https://archive.org/details/usenet?tab=collection -- I haven't reviewed it so I don't have a take on how complete it is, but the archive team there tends to be fairly completist.
- iggldiggl 3y ago
  uk.railway archives from that collection only go back into the early 2000s, whereas I know Google had posts going back into the 90s. (But unfortunately Google is currently blocking access on account of too much spam, maybe facilitated by Google Groups in the first place…)

thatoneguy 3y ago

I met my first girlfriend on Usenet back in the mid-90s. She sent me a mixtape I still have and her writing Bush(x) next to some of the Bush songs confused me for many years. Lots of college-aged people were around Usenet for help, advice and just listen to me. Same goes for IRC. I don't know if I'd be here if it wasn't for the online mentorship of slightly older strangers keeping me going until I found IRL friends and graduated from the internet. Anyhow, Google should release the original DejaNews archive to the public minus whatever posts people have told them to remove over the years. I've been told it arrived there on a handful of DVDs, so it's not exactly a lot of data in 2024.

aidenscott2016 3y ago
What does bush x mean?
- patcon 3y ago
  She was Canadian. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_(Canadian_band)#Name_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_(Canadian_band)#Name_di...
  - hoosieree 3y ago
    Unexpectedly wholesome resolution to the name dispute!
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Seems like a Canadian artist thing to do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_Above_1979#You're_a_Woman,_I'm_a_Machine_and_break_up_(2004–2006) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_Above_1979#You're_a...

kdwikzncba 3y ago

[dead]

fergie 3y ago

Practical question: How do you browse and search in mailing lists without Google Groups?

wakeupcall 3y ago
Open mailing lists often have public archives, for example https://www.mail-archive.com/ https://www.mail-archive.com/. Many lists are subscribed to multiple public archives. Those archives are often searchable on their own platforms, and are indexed by regular search engines too. Now about mailing lists created using the google "groups" platform itself, is a different story. Does google index it's own group archives? No idea. Those were _already_ horrible to look at before and I've subscribed most of the ones I follow to other public archives to get something usable.
layer8 3y ago
Traditionally if you're subscribed to a mailing list you'd basically have your own local archive of it and use your email client for search. If you wanted to incorporate messages from before you joined the list, you'd ask some old-timer to send you their mbox archive. Public/centralized archives as the sibling notes became common at some point, though usability is generally worse than with an email client (at least the power-user ones).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

splitbrain 3y ago

Wait. I'm confused. Google Groups was still interfacing with the Usenet? In a way that one could post to Usenet via Google Groups? I never knew that! I thought they were only hosting a read-only archive based on what they acquired with DejaNews. And I seem to recall a post about that having been discontinued... So this was somehow secretly all still alive? Damn.

giancarlostoro 3y ago
Even so… now you cant even read it. Say goodbye to many historic messages like Linus announcing his Kernel, and many dead links on the web.

philip1209 3y ago

They erase their own history: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java/c/aSPAJO05LIU/m/ushhUIQQ-ogJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java/c/aSPAJO05LIU/m/u...

Thorrez 3y ago
From the top of the page: >Viewing and searching of historical data will still be supported as it is done today. Disclosure: I work at Google (or at least I hope I still do), but not on this.

SyberShock 3y ago

Tuesday, September 11088, 1993 Usenet is dead. Usenet has always been dead. Usenet is dying. Usenet is always dying. Live with it. Long live Usenet! Google Groups is pulling the plug on Usenet. But the Eternal September will not end ...

drvdevd 3y ago
> Whether February 22, 2024 comes in like a lion or a lamb, that day will always be September 11131, 1993. > And one thing is sure: If September is eternal, then Usenet is eternal, too. Amazing. Love this.