Alternative to Google Groups

[Marco Moock]

This is only relevant for those people who read or post in that newsgroup using Google Groups.

Google will discontinue Groups in Feb 2024.

For those who do not know Usenet:

Usenet is a distributed communication system consisting of many servers. Google Groups is only one of them that closes down - other servers will stay available, but people need to use another server to read and post here.

You need to use an NNTP server with a so called newsreader.

As an NNTP server, some free services exist where you have to register:

For using it, you need a newsreader.

Some examples are:

You then need to configure a newsgroup account, sometimes also called NNTP.

For most servers, authentication must be enforced in the newsreader's settings.

For Thunderbird, a tutorial is available here:

For questions about configuring those readers, feel free to ask in the group news.software.readers.

[Ottavio Caruso]

Am 13/02/2024 um 08:49 schrieb Marco Moock:

WTF why do you give them ideas?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Is albasani.net still going?

Also its worth mentioning the non-free Usenet servers.

[Andy Burns]

The owner died in 2012 and it eventually shut down.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is deeply sad.

[Brian Gaff]

Is there one for the I Phone and what happened to Agent.

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

It stopped working after a crash last year, so whoever was running it obviously decided that it was a waste of time. It had a very restricted [ policy on groups and how many posts a day as well. Brian

[Andy Burns]

you're thinking of aioe not albasani.

apart from the hardware issue, I think the owner there is also in bad health.

[Rod Speed]

Brian Gaff [e-mail] wrote

Yep, NewsTap.

Works quite well but is rather slow downloading a new set of posts. Not really much of a problem now that volumes have dropped so much if you usenet daily. Can be a bit of a nuisance if you usenet say weekly.

[Paul]

No, the owner of Albasani passed away and Roman took over.

Something happened to the server, that threatened to need a rebuild, and Roman gave up on it. I don't think Roman had the amount of personal time needed, to spend on such a large project.

AIOE has some similarities, the difference being that Paolo knows how to bring a server up from nothing... because he had to do it once. He got kicked out of a COLO, for no really good reason, and... without his files. It's one of the reasons that the rental COLOs he used after that, were not Italian ones.

We don't know the full story about AIOE, as to what kicked the server over. I have a suspicion someone got into it and kicked it over. But that's just a guess on my part. Given the COLO machines are hardware poor, I don't think it was a firmware issue on a RAID hardware card that killed that server. It was more likely to be running a soft RAID mirror. With less reason for a "total fail", instead of a "degrade".

Paul