Google Groups to the Graveyard?

Contributing Infrastructure
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I know you’re not supposed to believe everything/anything you read on the Internet, but courtesy of SlashDot, this post came to my attention, which may be of interest: Google Groups has been left to die. The blogger is suggesting google Groups may be headed for the Google Graveyard. Of course, it may have to double-bunk in a grave! Jenkins Community does seem to make extensive use of Google Groups (i am a lurker/searcher on several).

I know there’s been a lot of prior discussion on where the community should virtually congregate, collaborate and share, both before and after the creation of the Discourse forum. I’ve tried my best to defend people using S/O to get help there with some success.

Nevertheless, consideration should be given to the what-ifs such that no one is surprised, any migration can be done in a prepared fashion, with key information and history preserved. Discourse seems to work well and with category expansion could work well, but I’d leave it to the Governance and Power Community to provide a path.

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Google groups is a feature offered to business users. I have my doubts they will kill it.

It’s def good to think about. Discourse, being open source, is possible to move to another provider or self host, same with matrix, which is why I pushed so hard for both of them

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Mailing lists, the beloved and future-proof way to communicate… or not?

I don’t think google groups are about to get sunset anytime soon, although it wouldn’t surprise me.
Speaking for the Jenkins project, we’re in good shape to have active community forums, with 500+ posts, 200+ signups and 100+ new contributors on a monthly (!!) basis, thanks to Discourse for sponsoring us :pray:

Plus, the Gitter/Matrix chat channels are quite vivid these days, so dropping google groups doesn’t mean ceasing communication at all. For the few groups bound to mailing lists, we can surely figure something out.