Gmane

» see gmane.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Gmane turned mailing lists into newsgroups. A project handed its list over, and from then on every message that went out by email also landed in a Usenet group on Gmane's news server, on a web page with a permanent address, and in a search index. It ran both ways, so you could answer from a newsreader and the post went back out to the list. Nothing ever expired. Back archives were imported where they existed, which is how a service that started in 2002 came to hold mail from the early nineties. The tagline was "Mail To News And Back Again".

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen built it and ran it. He is a Norwegian developer whose previous claim on the world was Gnus, the newsreader that lives inside Emacs, which explains the whole design: a man who already read his mail as news thought everyone should get the option. It opened in February 2002 on servers his employer in Oslo hosted as a favor. The front page kept a running count, and it climbed for a decade. Eight thousand lists at the start of 2006, twelve thousand in 2010, just under twenty thousand by early 2012. The last reading anyone took before the lights went out was 163,643,204 messages across 15,119 lists.

I never registered a list with it and never touched the news side. Gmane reached me the way it reached most working programmers, as the third result on an error message. You pasted something ugly into Google at two in the morning and got back a gmane.org page holding a thread from 2004 where four people on a kernel or Postgres list had argued their way to your answer six years before you had the problem. That was the product as far as I was concerned. Not the gateway or the newsreader access, just the fact that a decade of technical argument sat on the open web at a stable address with no login in front of it.

On 28 July 2016 he posted "The End of Gmane?" and said the web servers were not coming back up. He had been under distributed denial of service attack for weeks, which meant his employer was under attack too. He had spent years fielding demands to delete things. "Running a mailing list archive means, of course, that people want stuff removed from the archive, so I've apparently been sued in India (along with Google and Yahoo)." Underneath both of those was the plain arithmetic of fourteen years alone: "I'm old now. I almost threw up earlier tonight because I'm so stressed about the situation."

~ the case file ~

~ the spool without the code ~

A month later, on 29 August 2016, a company called Yomura announced it had taken Gmane over and put the assets into a UK company named Gmane Ltd. The sentence that mattered was in their own post: they had received the INN spool with all the articles but none of the code that drives the site. Ingebrigtsen had sent them an SSD and signed the domain across, because they insisted on owning it. Everything that made the archive searchable and linkable had to be written again from scratch.

They got something up by September. It worked badly and went down often. By the time LWN looked again on 28 February 2018 the front page still read "some things are very broken" and pointed at a blog last updated eighteen months earlier. The counter on that rebuilt page was still displaying 163,643,204, frozen at the number it held the day Lars stopped looking at it.

~ the permalinks that rotted ~

For fourteen years the correct way to cite a mailing list discussion was a gmane.org permalink. They went into bug trackers and Stack Overflow answers right across the free software world. LWN's description of the aftermath was "breaking thousands of links across the net", and that is the conservative reading.

A dead link to a shop is an annoyance. A dead link in a bug report is a missing argument, because somebody closed that ticket with "see the discussion here" and the discussion is gone, so the reasoning behind a decision your code still depends on has no public record any more. The messages were never deleted. The spool outlived every company involved. They simply stopped being reachable by the address that every citation had used.

~ one volunteer, one server ~

The thing ran on one person's attention for its entire useful life. Incoming mail went through SpamAssassin and outgoing posts through TMDA, so the gateway could not be turned into a spam cannon aimed at the twenty thousand lists it mirrored, and somebody had to keep that working as the spam problem got worse every year. A permanent public archive of everything anyone ever said on a technical list is also a permanent public archive of things people later wished they had not said. The deletion demands never stopped coming. Neither did what he called the death threats.

He kept running the news half himself after the sale. In January 2020 the server had to move because he had sold the company that hosted it, the new owners of the domain would not update a DNS record, and he registered gmane.io rather than wait. Then he re-subscribed roughly fifteen thousand mailing lists by script and by hand, solving captchas as he went. That is the institutional picture in one sentence: infrastructure the free software world had been citing for eighteen years could be picked up and carried to a new address because one man decided to carry it.

~ the nntp side lived ~

The news server at news.gmane.io answers today. It runs INN with posting enabled and carries something over 38,000 groups. Point a newsreader at it and subscribe to gmane.emacs.devel and you get 345,702 articles, which is the original 2002 proposition still intact. The web page at gmane.io is two paragraphs long and says the archive is reachable only over NNTP.

The original domain is worse off than dead. The name is still registered with nameservers configured at a registrar, and the .org zone answers NXDOMAIN for it. Every article.gmane.org and thread.gmane.org link ever pasted into a bug tracker now fails at the DNS layer, which at least fails faster than a parked page. Ingebrigtsen saw this part coming in 2016 and wrote the line the whole thing deserves as an epitaph: "I feel like I'm letting down a generation here."

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