Re:Tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017
by kakarot on Monday January 01, 2018 @08:08AM
(#16045926)
> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups
One part of me believes this would be the best native addon coming from Mozilla in years.
The other part of me worries it would bring on a new age of Eternal September to Usenet, which has been isolated long enough again to form a particular kind of culture that would seem fragile in the face of sudden mass immigration given the size of the Usenet community today.
Re:Tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017
by ghaff on Monday January 01, 2018 @08:29AM
(#16045989)
Google makes some IMO very weird decisions about seemingly low effort/cost offerings, even if a bit niche, that would seem to be very complementary to products/services that it does put its full weight behind. Dropping Reader didn't make a lot of sense to me for this reason. The lukewarm support for Scholar is another.
Re:Tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017
by Filligree on Monday January 01, 2018 @12:04PM
(#16046826)
Google's infrastructure is geared towards making enormous services cheaper to run, at all costs. As a result, the maintenance burden of Reader was far higher than you might have expected.
That should explain at least part of the decision.
Re:Tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017
by rospaya on Monday January 01, 2018 @11:57AM
(#16046784)
> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.
Newsgroups were always bundled with email clients, so Thunderbird has support for NNTP.
Re:Tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017
by LV-426 on Monday January 01, 2018 @03:08PM
(#16047765)
I know, I said that in my post:
It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client,
because they are closely related, but not many people
use email clients any more, so not many people are
going to find Usenet that way.
A better idea than a web interface IMO is Usenet access simply built into a browser by default. It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, because they are closely related, but not many people use email clients any more, so not many people are going to find Usenet that way.
If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.