Earlier today I tooted a link to a news article about Google discontinuing links to Usenet news.
Personally, I'd more or less forgotten Usenet news existed.
Over fifteen years ago we killed off our Usenet news service at my then work. The exercise was bit of a hoot as we had an SLA with a couple of other institutions to provide a news feed, and of course needed their agreement.
In one case getting agreement was easy, in the other they'd outsourced their IT provision to a windows based commercial provider, and somewhere along the line they'd forgotten to include NNTP provision as one of the contracted services, and of course all the original people had moved on, and there was no one left who actually knew what Usenet news was, or even if they still had a forgotten box sitting quietly in a cabinet somewhere...
Anyway, once they understood the problem, they found someone to agree to the termination of the SLA. I don't know if they ever found if they still had an nntp server running.
Because I was interested in Roman archaeology and some environmental science topics I would occasionally check in on Usenet even after we turned off our server via a server at a university in the Netherlands, but eventually everything I was interested in migrated to blogs and the service formerly known as twitter, and in the end I simply stopped using it.
For old times sake I checked in on a couple of the groups I used to follow via google groups this morning.
The moderated ones are simply moribund - moderators retire or get tired of the job and the groups just die and remain there frozen in time.
Unmoderated groups seem to be full of irrelevant porn and posts offering dodgy financial services, and even the mad conspiracy theorists who used to rave on about the fringes of US politics seem to have moved to another echo chamber.
I guess that's how services end, not a bang, not a whimper, but a long drawn out death rattle ...
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