Google has shut down many services, including some surprising ones.
Without getting alarmed, I think it's reassuring that we could handle an
end-of-life of Google Groups on fairly short notice, if that ever
happened...
Regarding hosting of the email list server... worst case, were Google
Groups to shut down with no good migration offering... if we can't find
a turn-key email list service we like, we could always run the
time-honored MailMan on either one of the affiliated universities'
in-house systems (if the non-owned .org domain name isn't a problem for
that .edu), or on Linode/AWS/etc.
That part doesn't have to be much work (click a few buttons with a
turn-key hoster, copy&paste the user list, point a DNS MX record at the
new server), *unless* we have to set up a new MailMan install (which
implies a lot more sys-admin tasks, immediate and then ongoing maintenance).
The tricky parts of moving are not with the email list server itself,
but preserving the archive and citation links:
* Reconstructing a past email list archive, which, unless Google offers
list managers a complete data dump, might mean either scraping the raw
emails from Google Groups while it's still around (or from one of those
email list mirror services that hopefully caught everything and didn't
mangle it), or taking it from someone's personal saved emails (and
carefully weeding out any messages that weren't actually to the list,
like discussions taken offline).
* Were Google Groups shut down in such a way that citation links (for
messages and threads) were broken (no read-only version, no configurable
redirects), we'd partly have to accept that there will be broken links.
Were we to scrape the archive, we might be able to preserve the info
about the old links, and then put up a Web page that makes it easier for
people to reconstruct a link on demand, but that's significant work for
perhaps little benefit.
(Actually, if we *knew* Google Groups was going to be shut down in a
cold and uncaring way, it might be a business opportunity for someone:
not only offer alternative hosting for email lists and Web forums, but
also automate the migration of people's data, maybe including some way
of patching broken links. Your link-patching might work among all lists
you host, even those managed by different parties, which could motivate
referrals for other lists to move to you. This is a big job, not
because implementing a email list or Web forum service is difficult
beyond engineering for robustness, but because Google Groups is more
complicated than it looks, and you have to wade through all that, and
triage and map features. Then maybe FB would try to buy you, to
eliminate you as competition as you segue into additional social media
services, as well as to grab ownership of all your users and their
communications. Though, the clear, refreshing taste of Racket could
make this messy business go more easily. :)
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