Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

> I just tried it. I created an account on a Lemmy instance. Now I also want to join other instances. But how to do it? I won't create an account for every instance, but I'm stuck now.

Just like email, you do not need to create multiple accounts to talk to people from other servers, unless they have blocked one another. I am confused, I find it likely that HackerNews readers would know this. Perhaps you're making a point?

> So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't.

I'm sure this is a familiar argument to most of us here. People usually focus on technical solutions, making it easier, one-click, fool-proof. I fear that is a game corporations and centralised services have an advantage in.

I have an alternative. It's not an easy solution, but a social solution to this would be to have "family sysadmins". Someone in the family who is at least slightly tech-savvy, helping the other members of the family set up their accounts. There is no need for the average person to understand federation or to be tech-savvy in this case. In other words, "help your family and friends with their IT stuff instead of putting them in the control of big corporations".

> Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions.

I made an account around the time when I started reading HN for the first time. I was a master student in computer science. Other than the reason to be able to create things out of my imagination, another reason why I studied computer science is because I felt too dumb to grok the field. So it was me stretching myself out of my academic comfort zone since I felt I'd never be able to grok programming. I cannot describe how heavy of a pressure I put on myself. How would you feel if what you're trying to attempt is almost certainly futile? The only counter argument I had is that I knew that humans (myself included) are notoriously difficult at predicting someone's capability. In the master computer science, I was scraping by at that point.

When I found HN, it felt quite inaccessible to be honest. It felt too geeky, too technical. I was able to stay around was because of the broad curiosity in all kinds of topics. A related reason was that curiosity is the main virtue that HN stands for, which is the same virtue I've stood for since I was 7 years old. I remember reading all the non-technical submissions for a few months while once or twice per week reading an actual technical submission.

Mind you, I had enough training, I took my computer science master over the course of multiple years (while also doing a bachelor in psych and a master in game-design, simultaneously). And yet, I could only bare 1 or 2 technical articles per day.

It took a whole year of acclimation. After a year, HN felt fully accessible. I could enjoy any submission on there. In part, what really helped was that I took very very hard computer science courses and that gave me an intellectual development that has been unprecedented ever since. After that, HN felt like home.

But for that whole year, it was interesting but it also felt like a strain on my mind every day.

So to say that HN does not have a high barrier of entry, I'd respectfully disagree. I don't think I'd be able to have enjoyed this place if I wouldn't have studied computer science. I know there are non-technical people on here that are able to do that. I know that I simply wouldn't, and I think there are others like me that couldn't have either.

> What if they were spies in the field, exchanging coded messages? Like posting classified ads in newspapers, it's one of those places nobody will look at.

I have wondered the same thing multiple times, having seen posts that either didn't resemble anything human generated, or were suspiciously crafted seemingly with steganography in mind. Spam itself could be used for that purpose; who would suspect that "6uy v1@gr@" from user XYZ read by an automated system that downloads groups regularly would actually trigger an action somewhere?

Usenet could (and still can) be operated via telnet using the NNTP protocol [1]. The whole protocol is ASCII-based, just like HTTP, and works via simple text commands. The most common way to access Usenet back in the day was over dialup.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc977

Some comp.* groups get reasonable traffic even today although naturally it's mostly the same regulars. And I know of at least a couple of alt.* and rec.* groups that are worth checking on occasion. And there are some others that are kept alive through google groups traffic.

And then there is GMANE.