Oddly enough these things have been going on since 2001, and have been curated gardens instead of the mess that is usenet (which is still operational!), or private mailing lists.
The 2 that Im on are the Hercules 390 group which moved to group.io. While other groups like H390-music (MUSIC/SP the Canadian mainframe OS with internet hooks) that sadly died along with it’s author, is probably going to be purged from the internet.
Along with other things like pdos, or even the board game Supremacy.
I don’t know what the answer is, other than to always have downloadable mailing list archives, and never trust a single place. So much stuff is deleted to save trivial amounts of space, and neither corporations nor government institutions can be trusted to maintain anything.
Thankfully there is archive.org, but who backs them up?
Archive team are in the progress of backing up yahoo groups. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups
There’s also been some experiments for backing it up. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
Please run https://github.com/nsapa/yahoo-group-archiver/ against the restricted groups you want to backup.
You will need extract from your browser the T and Y cookie:
python2 yahoo-group-archiver/yahoo.py -u [YOUR_LOGIN] -p ‘[YOUR_PASSWORD]’ -ct ‘[T_COOKIE]’ -cy ‘[Y_COOKIE]’ pdos
It’s a little involved to get going, but I’m happily archiving groups! thanks!
Great, I grabbed all my subscriptions!
Now to find interesting things.. Sadly so many are members only, like objc… So strange.
Walled gardens just collapse onto themselves. Can’t wait for the inevitable Facebook collapse.