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Comment by segfaultbuserr | Hacker News Reader

This is horrible.

Some Yahoo Groups must be still active as mailing lists, or at least an archive for some niche communities, and they have irreplaceable, valuable information. I don't know other groups, but I know the Tektronix oscilloscope group (TekScopes) has been on Yahoo for a decade, and it's often the only source of information about vintage Tektronix oscilloscopes that dated back to the 1960s, some were former engineers with firsthand experience who can help to fix your scope or identify a replacement part, and the mailing list archive has a lot of lost knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere.

Well, fortunately TekScopes migrated to Groups.io in recent years, which is good. But just think about other groups...

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I've seen several fandom wikis recently which sourced things to Yahoo Groups comments from the creators. Presumably those statements will be lost forever soon unless someone spots those things and archives them.

In the present, it feels a bit silly to mourn random posts from writers and webcomic creators as a serious loss. But when I consider the impact of past artists' letters and journals (e.g. Tolkien), it feels rather different. Some of these silly things will turn into real academic and historical sources if only they survive.

> I've seen several fandom wikis

Internet subculture surfing and archaeology is my favorite hobby, I do it for fun, not for researches. I have seriously considered quit software engineering and move to social science, but it will remain as a hobby.

I've spent a long time browsing alt.folklore.computers and Usenet FAQs from early Usenet archives, or reading the long-deleted 4chan posts from Bibliotheca Anonoma [0], a repository of history and folklore from Something Awful, 2channel, 4chan, and looking up and laughing at memes that nobody remembers. Or read the early writings and thoughts of online personalities long forgotten.

The biggest frustrating in my exploration is meeting a dead link that hasn't been archived by archive.org, if it occurs, all bets are off, the journey ends officially. By erasing a webpage, parts of the collective history and culture is thereby removed.

I've also seen the death of endless small communities due to changes of circumstances, usually without a warning and happens overnight.

The lesson is that we should donate to archive.org today, just click here. https://archive.org/donate/

[0] https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon

This seems fun. Any advice on getting started? It's so tough to find new sites. I tried making a website before to find new interesting sites, but it never took off.

Go on geocities search engine

Web archaeologists, that seems fun, necessary, and something way cool in 10 years from now

I don't know about that. I recently found out how a webcomic I followed until the artist was forced to cancel it was supposed to end. It gave me some closure for characters I spent years caring about.

>This is horrible.

I would post a counter argument: this is inevitable. Anything stored on someone else's machine, especially for free, is subject to disappear at any moment. Even if Yahoo wanted to keep Groups active, a hardware failure or natural disaster could undo all of this in the blink of an eye. At least this way Yahoo is giving people the opportunity to archive and move things.

It should be the expectation that irreplaceable, valuable information should be archived somewhere that offers the hope of long term archival.

> a hardware failure or natural disaster

This is generally something that large "Internet" companies are handling well. A hardware failure or natural disaster wiping out a datacenter will generally not affect data that such companies want to keep.

There are several I'm on (canard-aviators and gns480-users), and they've been active for something close to a decade. (And there are still emails every day!)

Frustratingly, both of these groups have great content (manuals, tips, documentation) uploaded to Yahoo Groups. It's going to be a real loss.

You may want to start archiving them immediately using the advice from this comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21272524

I think there's an important lesson to learn: unlike offline, many online communities only exist because people find it interesting, and there exist many things that no one will take care about. If not now, when? It not you, who?

For me, it's the local Freecycle community in my city.

Also, an area UU church still uses Yahoo Groups for several mailing lists. Trying to help them technically 10 years ago was difficult at the least; I gave up and eventually moved on. It took a few deaths in the congregation for them to update their website, for example. And now, the virtual death of Yahoo Groups will force them to change again.

Archive them! Please! For the good of the future.

They will apparently still work as mailing lists

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