Earlier quoted context omitted.
That can also mean its time to start using Usenet again... and should keep it under radar this time.
Just like emule. Shhh
soulseek works fine too :)
Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
101–110 of 217 posts
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#102> 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).
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. 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. Edit: And the instructions how to do it are buried away somewhere around two-thirds of the way through the…
I'm trying to add some content to help people like you. Can you take a look at https://communick.com/docs/getting-started-with-lemmy-a-guid... and give me some feedback?
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#103I 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…
Another thing we lost, that we're just rediscovering with the kneecapping of Reddit and Twitter, is that Usenet was decentralized by design. Feed goes down or has problems? Get it from somewhere else.
It was very much not perfect, though. Spam, hoaxes, and general crap abounded, and moderation was all-or-nothing and iffy at best. Hopefully, the ActivityPub world can avoid some of Usenet's mistakes and get us out of the single-point-of-failure model.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still stubbornly hope that one of these silicone valley boys will "invent" USENET, and package it up nicely for the masses. That'd be cool.
https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed README: DFeed is: an NNTP client a mailing list archive a forum-like web interface an ATOM aggregator an IRC bot
That seems to turn usenet into a forum
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#105> 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.
That sounds to me a lot like early Reddit. Or 4chan, for that matter.
But to be fair I like my communities small, obscure, slightly unfriendly and without PR. Every good community I've liked had a phase of being nice to newcomers who were trying to fit and being hostile to those who weren't, so maybe there's something to it.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#106I 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).
Facebook, reddit, discord. It doesn't matter, all of them are inferior to usenet in usability. Usenet fails in the easy to get started with, but once you figure out how to get on usenet (which I no longer know how to do!) it is a much better experience. Usenet has the concept of "I already read this", so you can have long discussions. All other forums when you get more than a few dozen posts it is hard to track what you have seen and so you don't go back to look for more discussion even if it would be insightful.
Facebook often doesn't even show you interesting discussions if the discussion is interesting to you but not for the average person.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
There are many forums for specific communities: specific car brands, sometimes even specific car models , watches, keyboards even (!), etc. I'm on forums like these and they're doing totally fine. And if anything with the recent Reddit SNAFU the last thing users there want is for some central authority in SV to decide what they're allowed to talk about.
The trick is finding these, especially with today's crippled search engines. But indeed, it tends to be subject-specific forums rather than general-interest.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#108"From posts here and elsewhere, I have some idea what a 'life' might be, and how I might get one. But, what is this 'offline'?"
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the two big reasons to move to Reddit were (a) single interface and login and (b) threaded conversations. Which is to say, Reddit (well, Slashdot really) reinvented the things that Usenet had had but which had been lost in the migration to traditional web-based forums.
Cool! I didn't know threaded conversations were a concept from usenet. I do wonder though, why on earth are so many communities moving to facebook and Discord, the two platforms that are decidedly worse than either usenet or phpbb. Some have come to realize facebook was a mistake, but may be committing an even worse one by moving to Discord.
At least there's competition, like Mastodon for the Twitter-like approach and Lemmy or Kbin for something more Reddit-like. I'm thinking these are our best way out if Usenet can't be rebooted.
Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many forums for specific communities: specific car brands, sometimes even specific car models , watches, keyboards even (!), etc. I'm on forums like these and they're doing totally fine. And if anything with the recent Reddit SNAFU the last thing users there want is for some central authority in SV to decide what they're allowed to talk about.
Ah, interesting. To be clear, I also meant for specific communities: like for specific hobbies or tabletop games, or niche interests. They've all abandoned forums and, regrettably, moved on to Facebook or Discord. I'll never understand why they choose Discord, a closed chat platform, for forum type discussions. At this point I feel like Quixote tilting at the wind mills.
I don't understand that either. Discord feels like a hamster wheel connected to a turbocharger.