Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

mastodon.sdf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 217 posts

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#11

Post by ggm »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

Google offered to uplift the groups, and somewhat choked the model to death. I think Brad Templeton and others gave them tapes. (A good thing at the time) or maybe an early crate of disc drives got shared.

A bunch of pre 90s data caches got uplifted and then silently seemed to vanish. I was a box admin in the UK in the early 80s and my honey-danber database records were online for a while in the maps Usenet group. They're not responding to search any more.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#12

Post by sigg3 »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

In my unqualified opinion the usability of e.g. phpBB forums (discussing through the browser) was much better than calling up a local BBS on telnet. Multilevel prompt menus in telnet can be quite maze-like.

Web crawlers indexed online forums too, so you could find the content right away through the same search engine instead of having to search the BBS discussions for hours or post a request on the local BBS and wait (days) for replies. Your technically illiterate aunt could browse the search results for posts containing the recipes she wanted from a number of disparate forums, and choose to read anonymously (and print out) or login and contribute. All you need is an email address.

This accessibility and semi-transparency created a major shift in where you go for content, effectively forcing the tech literate to follow suit as well. It fits in the general trend of democratizing the internet, and IMO was a good thing for tech. (I blame the monetizing and large commercial entities for the current state of fragmentation.)

I still login to a local BBS about once a year to say hello. Although I have a shell account now so I don't need to telnet over the net. It's still very alternative and hacker friendly.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#13

Post by Nursie »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

Freenet is very different, it's a free-speech oriented protocol/server which provides a way to publish anonymously/untraceably and have the network host arbitrary content in such a way as you aren't supposed to even be able to tell what data is stored on your own node. Effectively a censorship-resistant and deniable publishing model. I haven't looked into it for nearly two decades now, but when I did it was full of CSAM and I decided I couldn't run a node in good faith.

Usenet was great while it was a niche thing and before the advent of spam. It was distributed in the sense that most ISPs would run a server and they would mirror messages between them. You'd use your mail client to talk to your ISP's server, and messages would be like emails, but threaded somewhat like a forum. Binary files were usually uuencoded and often split across multiple chunks.

Unlike solutions run by centralised entities, it really did feel like a public square, but your ISP could and often did decide which groups they would carry. On the flip-side your ISP or university could carry its own groups which weren't replicated out to the wider internet, for local discussion.

It died for a few reasons but there were a few main reasons and mainest of those (lol) was that spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost, all actual conversation just got drowned out pretty fast.

It had an undeath (maybe still does?) as a way to distribute pirated material, mostly because 'normies' didn't know about it and it would fly under the radar. All the movies on torrent sites would come from groups releasing them on usenet. I guess these particular users weren't affected by spam, and weren't a target for spam because no human was trying to read the groups...

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#14

Post by NoGravitas »

est wrote: post #8
hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

> usenet was already distributed From my limited understanding, it's not "distributed" as you think It's "distributed" among ISPs. It's like one of the yourname@isp.com free emails, To run a usenet server, you need a server with public IP with TCP port 119 open. It's like running your own email service.

Decentralized would probably be a better word than distributed.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#17

Post by masklinn »

ggm wrote: post #11
hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

Google offered to uplift the groups, and somewhat choked the model to death. I think Brad Templeton and others gave them tapes. (A good thing at the time) or maybe an early crate of disc drives got shared. A bunch of pre 90s data caches got uplifted and then silently seemed to vanish. I was a box admin in the UK in the early 80s and my honey-danber database records were online for a while in the maps Usenet group. Th…

Google purchased the ailing Deja News and its archive, and the Spencer archives got donated to it as well with posts back to the 80s.

But within a few years Google stopped caring about it entirely.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#18

Post by pyinstallwoes »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

Anything that depends on an ISP is not truly distributed or decentralized. You'd need a way to route ad-hoc networks deterministically. You'd have to replace BGP with something like DHT.

Yggdrasil is one example of this although it is an 'overlay' and not a direct protocol replacement. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#19

Post by benterix »

dredmorbius wrote: post #4
hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi... > (I'm au…

I would add another important point: earlier, there was nothing like NNTP. So when someone showed you "the Internet", they showed you email, gopher (later the web), IRC and so on. These were separate services with unique features. The appearance of CGI and dynamically generated content was a big revolution at that time. Then, everything converged in the web, and when Google took over the newsgroups, there was practically zero incentive for new Internet users even learn what NNTP was.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#20

Post by onetimeuse92304 »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

It lived as long as people who used it were select technical elite. You know, people with genuine interests, using it to meet other, like minded people.

But whenever people meet in unmoderated digital world, all sorts of other toxic people follow -- spammers, trolls, etc. People who don't care about the community or personal exchanges.

This makes the place toxic and unpalatable to the ones who started it and so the real people just leave and the place dies.

Post reply on HN