Re: Can the SocialWeb save Google Groups? (or, at least do what it should do?)

On Thu, 9 Mar 2023 at 21:33, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:

> As discussed on /.
> <https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/08/172217/google-groups-has-been-left-to-die>,
> yesterday, Andrew Helwer asked on his blog
> <https://ahelwer.ca/post/2023-03-08-google-groups/>: *"Google Groups has
> been left to die: Where should the formal methods community move?**"* He
> suggests that Google Groups is in decline and that *"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."*
>
> It seems to me that the kind of discussion groups that started on USENET
> and then eventually migrated over to Google Groups are, in fact, "social"
> and thus might be usefully included within the scope of this group. (Even
> though NNTP is an IETF RFC, not a W3C standard.) In fact, it appears that
> one could construct a useful analog to these legacy systems using
> ActivityStreams and ActivityPub -- but not the way they are implemented in
> Mastodon or most other existing AS/AP systems. It is also quite clear that
> using a Federated approach to maintain this kind of discussion might
> protect them from the catastrophic loss that arises when a proprietary
> system decides to change its priorities.
>
> Is a future for USENET/Google Groups-like social interactions
> appropriately discussed here? Can or should the SocialWeb provide a new,
> more persistent, home for Helwer's Format Methods Community?
>
> What do you think?
>
>
I love the idea of restoring NNTP to its former glory, all we need is
Bayesian filtering and proper moderation to deal with the SPAM issues that
near enough killed it before google took it on and flattened its context.

If we can create a modified ActivityPub standard that deals with
hierarchical comments and without the extras not in NNTP the specification
but with ActivityStreams style syntax/semantics and do it in OWL it would
be a good start.

Regards,

Aaron
-- 
Aaron Gray

Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher,
Information Theorist, and Computer Scientist.