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Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

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

#81

Post by rglullis »

tgv wrote: post #59
rglullis wrote: post #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).

Lemmy has quite a few negatives. It's small, highly fragmented, obscure to newcomers, and still has a vitriolic commenters, even in the more serious groups. And it doesn't have any PR/marketing. It's not going to take off.

> It's not going to take off.

It already did: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

It will be a slow descent for reddit, but if you take the "rule" of social media that splits content creators/active participants/lurkers as 1/9/90%, and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.

Yeah, network effects are still at play, but there is already a critical mass of people on Lemmy that want it to work. I find myself posting a lot more than I ever did on reddit (or even here) because I look at it as tending a garden.

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

#82

Post by boffinAudio »

jwr wrote: post #52
renegade-otter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good times. News Rover was part of my life back then. I should note that the BINARY usenet is still on fire, if you know what that's used for, that is. My first experience with the Internet was via WebTV, and WebTV had a gated Usenet - only the users had access to it. It was just full of red hot, vicious flame wars. In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general. Take away the barr…

I was a newsadmin back in the day. I hated the binary side of USENET. It brought nothing but trouble, and even on the technical side was a big load on the server.

I remember turning on the modem bank of an ISP I helped build back in the day, with great anticipation to learn what the newcomers to the Internet were going to be doing with that amazingly fast new T1 line I'd slaved to get installed, only to discover after 3 weeks of logging that 95% of that fast connection was just being used to download porn, from our USENET server.

Things haven't changed much since then.

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

#83

Post by kryptiskt »

jsnell wrote: post #43

The author seems to have been working alphabetically, and didn't even get out of alt (for me the thread stops at alt.f*). So it's not exactly delivering on what title of the HN submission promises. Is there more to the thread, actually looking at all 65k groups or a fair sample of them? Where can one find it?

He continues through it all in the rest of the thread.

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

#84

Post by jsnell »

kryptiskt wrote: post #83
jsnell wrote: post #43

The author seems to have been working alphabetically, and didn't even get out of alt (for me the thread stops at alt.f*). So it's not exactly delivering on what title of the HN submission promises. Is there more to the thread, actually looking at all 65k groups or a fair sample of them? Where can one find it?

He continues through it all in the rest of the thread.

But there is no "rest of the thread" that I can see. Like I said, the thread ends at alt.f*.

If there is more, how do you get to it?

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

#85

Post by bembo »

jsnell wrote: post #43

The author seems to have been working alphabetically, and didn't even get out of alt (for me the thread stops at alt.f*). So it's not exactly delivering on what title of the HN submission promises. Is there more to the thread, actually looking at all 65k groups or a fair sample of them? Where can one find it?

The thread continues and he actually got through all of them.

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

#86

Post by the_af »

jwr wrote: post #48

I don't think the OP actually used Usenet back in the day. The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995. The comp.* hierarchy was rather good and that's where the action was. I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers si…

> So now we have to live with those "forums"

Which forums do you mean? Every community I was part of has moved to facebook groups, Reddit or Discord. PhpBB has gone the way of the dodo (regrettably, since those were the "good old days" for me, since I never used usenet).

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

#87

Post by prometheus76 »

quaddo wrote: post #80
renegade-otter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good times. News Rover was part of my life back then. I should note that the BINARY usenet is still on fire, if you know what that's used for, that is. My first experience with the Internet was via WebTV, and WebTV had a gated Usenet - only the users had access to it. It was just full of red hot, vicious flame wars. In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general. Take away the barr…

I remember when the news came out that AOL was going to connect/gateway to the internet at large. There was a concerned expectation that there would be a distinct drop in the quality of USENET posts. They did not disappoint.

It's called Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#88

Post by pjc50 »

bawolff wrote: post #39
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that is a silly definition, but doesn't usenet fit? It didn't start on the internet and supported rather arbitrary routing.

USENET very much depended on ISPs in practice, they ran most of the servers!

However, yes it was theoretically possible to have a route between two NNTP servers that wasn't over a BGP-routed chunk of internet but was "something else". Including posting a tape.

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

#89

Post by pjc50 »

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…

This is the correct answer. Since it was a "permissionless publish" system, with no authentication, anyone could post anything. This was a disaster in the way that pure free speech systems always are.

(To some extent, there was a natural response in that anyone could cancel anything, although those ended up adding authentication. At one point people estimated that a third of traffic was spam and another third was "spam cancels".)

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html (1998!)

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

#90

Post by prometheus76 »

glimshe wrote: post #31

First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was…

I lived in a small town in Nevada in the early 90s, and I ran one of the local BBSs. Every six months or so, we would have an IRL party and meet other BBS sysops and the users. It was really fun to finally be able to put faces with usernames.

BBSs kind of served as a filtering device for finding other people like you. In a small town, it was easy to feel isolated and lonely for being a nerd, but then you find this community of other nerds!

It was great and I don't know the equivalent nowadays.

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