It's a waste to lose all of the software that was used to connect to usenet. Today there's a small trend to write adapters of popular boards (reddit, lobsters) to NNTP protocol, so that this old software can be re-used (so that it's possible to browse reddit through an NNTP reader).
Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
21–30 of 217 posts
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#22This 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…
As someone else said, usenet was replaced by phpBB forums, which kept the similar structure but were easier to moderate and easier to use too.
The real question would be why did those forums mostly died nowadays? I don't have a definite answer, but from the user viewpoints:
- Centralised services had the benefit of only creating one account (remember password managers were uncommon! People were advised only to create accounts of websites they would trust, to avoid leaking their passwords they often re-used)
- More modern UI and the "new factor"/hype definitely helped people moving
Let's not forget the move was also sometimes initiated by the webmasters, who did not want to pay and administrate it forever (Canonical example being a teenager spawning a forum about one of your hobby, then still maintaining it a decade later while having lost all interest)
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#23> The most similar thing to newsgroups today is Reddit, and I really enjoy following some communities.
Which in turn will die and give way to Lemmy (generally ActivityPub).
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#24This 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…
Yup, all those. Also, at least for me:
- it was slow
- it wasn't consistent; not unusual that thread replies would be out of order
- it was text only (essentially)
- posting and downloading binary files was even slower and cumbersome)
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
See? The best way to get good answers is to give bad ones and get corrected.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#26This 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 died because running a communication platform for humans on the internet is hard.
In particular it died because whatever moderation it had (almost none TBH) was no barrier to bad actors, so it drowned in spam and troll posts.
Then the centralized social platforms took over with their network effects and moderation paid for from ads.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#27Steve Gibson, regardless of what people might think of him, still runs his own usenet server and have a nice little community going.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#28This 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…
> 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
This might strongly depend on the corner of usenet you were in, but there were large and important groups where elitism was absolutely cancerous, and a culture I don't miss. I frequented German end English groups, and can say that it was much worse in the German ones. Absolutely condescending attitude towards newcomers if they "misbehaved" even in the slightest; you'd have the "n00bs" post and then a dozen replies by the regulars circle-jerking by dissecting the OP down to every little detail they did wrong and trying to one-up each other in sarcasm. A typical flex was the length of your killfile.
Web-Based bulletin-boards (phpBB, vBulletin, WBB, ...) quickly took over in the early 2000s, which had the advantage of having superior moderation tools (e.g. being able to remove spam after the fact), giving a more consistent experience to users. Bulletin boards still tended to have the elitist group of regulars compared to usenet, albeit less pronounced. Some/Much of this can probably also be attributed to the users of those boards being a new generation of Internet users, which just had a different approach and attitude, much like we see today with facebook vs. Instagram, YouTube vs. TikTok etc.
What managed to mostly kill Internet forums was probably reddit, which improved SNR a lot by having the up/downvote system, and while technically being even more centralized than bulletin boards, managed to grow so much by basically allowing their users to create subreddits, which would equal the sub-forums in bulletin boards, which only the board's administrator could create.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#29It's a waste to lose all of the software that was used to connect to usenet. Today there's a small trend to write adapters of popular boards (reddit, lobsters) to NNTP protocol, so that this old software can be re-used (so that it's possible to browse reddit through an NNTP reader).
Where are those? I'm game, would love to centralise some of those boards in a desktop client.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#30This 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…
It feels silly to say this since it sounds like you’ve been using Usenet since the dawn of time, but you can get GUI-based news readers that fetch articles from your Usenet over the internet, no dialing up or using Telnet required.
Properly configured, these news readers feel just like email clients, with threading and signatures and all that. Yes, the configuration part is some work but you only have to do it once and then you’re set up for all of Usenet. With forums you have to find and create an account separately for each one.