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The End of Gmane? (ingebrigtsen.no)
If any of you use mailing list archive Gmane, you would want to start looking at its alternative. Gmane developer Lars Ingebrigtsen announced Thursday that he is thinking about ending the decade-old email-to-news gateway. But first, for those unaware about Gmane, here's is what it does: It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Gmane is an archive; it never expires messages (unless explicitly requested by users). Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service.Ingebrigtsen said Gmane machines are under numerous DDoS attacks -- coupled with some other issues -- that have made him wonder whether it is worth the time and effort to keep Gmane ticking. He writes: I'm thinking about ending Gmane, at least as a web site. Perhaps continue running the SMTP-to-NNTP bridge? Perhaps not? I don't want to make 20-30K mailing lists start having bouncing addresses, but I could just funnel all incoming mail to /dev/null, I guess... The nice thing about a mailing list archive (with NNTP and HTTP interfaces) is that it enables software maintainers to say (whenever somebody suggests using Spiffy Collaboration Tool of the Month instead of yucky mailing lists) is "well, just read the stuff on Gmane, then". I feel like I'm letting down a generation here.As Gmane's future remains uncertain, Ingebrigtsen recommends people to have a look at Mail Archive.
You're missing the bigger picture -- whether Usenet itself is dead or not, the fact that we're replacing open protocols with closed, proprietary web interfaces controlled by a single entity is a huge regression. Replacing Usenet with 8 million different web forums that I have to register with individually and use a different interface to read is not an improvement.
NNTP and SMTP may be old protocols but the problems they solve haven't gone away, only changed somewhat. People still talk about stuff in public. People still exchange private messages with each other. None of that is obsolete. That doesn't mean old protocols can't change or new ones can't be invented, but if you don't understand why and how the old stuff worked, all you're doing is jerking yourself off with a shiny Javascript widget. We don't need any more of that, thanks.