First of all, thank you Lars for running this invaluable service for so long!

And second, regarding the question “Is it even useful for anybody any more?”:

Definitely yes. I have often used news.gmane.org to selectively read for example emacs-devel and other mailing lists without having to subscribe to all of them. The NNTP gateway allows very convenient browsing of messages, and also posting and responding, from within Emacs and especially via Gnus for which we can also thank you.

It is great that this will now continue at news.gmane.io, so thank you once more!

For the case when you want to read a mailing list but do not want to subscribe to it, I've been using kill-the-newsletter a lot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12949154)

To answer another question from the post:

"But do I want to do this? Asking mailing lists admins to trust me again, with a new domain after the previous debacle, is a bit too much, isn't it?"

I'm a list admin for a mailing list available on gmane. Granted, it doesn't get much traffic. As a list admin, I feel that Lars -- via gmane -- is providing an invaluable service for my list. At least for me, it's not too much to ask, though I'm a sample size of one.

I appreciate being able to use Gmane to read and contribute to so many mailing lists, all from the comfort of my favorite newsreader (gnus). Rather than having many sporadically-followed lists delivered via email, I can access them over NNTP, saving disk space etc. I'd miss it if it were gone.

Thanks Lars! For Gnus and for Gmane! For your code, your time, and the (donated because of you) news and web servers.

Don’t beat yourself up over the loss of the domain name. You have given more to your community than most people ever will. Your (structured [0]) procrastination likely lead to your contributions in the first place. So if they lead to some hiccoughs as well, then we, the beneficiaries, can take the bad with the good.

This downtime that seems significant now, may not be. Users of a free service I co-run came back in droves after our similar lack of attention led to an “unexpected” 32bit ID roll-over that took months of downtime to resolve. Our users came back in droves (and though never back to the same level as before) with nothing but thanks after having tried the alternatives. Gmane was a breath of fresh air when you released it, and I suspect nothing compares still today. It may not warrant as much of your time today as it once did. So it goes.

Also, allow someone to help. I never could have handled our failures on my own.

[0] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

The company formed to hold the assets is proposed to be struck off: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10325734

I wonder if gmane.org will get renewed anyway, as it's due to expire in March.

-- A previously-happy user

I guess C is cloudflare; But have no idea who Y is - perhaps Yahoo, but then they would be O[ath] by now....

It was some smaller company, one that I had never heard about until they picked up Gmane. The name is probably somewhere in the gmane mailing list archives (available via nntp) but if Lars doesn't want to name them, I think it would be polite not to publish it here.

It's named in a previous article linked in this article.

It's "Yomura Corporation"