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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)

#121

Post by zoky »

boffinAudio wrote: post #82
jwr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bro be acting like the motivation for getting the T1 installed in the first place wasn’t for porn… Remember what the Internet is for, after all.

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

#122

Post by distcs »

fouc wrote: post #115
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?

you have to click on the corresponding message where the thread continues/forks from. Sometimes it's the last message, sometimes you have to go back a few messages. It continues again from here: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103470433583276145

I scrolled through all of it and it still ends at alt.* which is a minuscule fraction of all of usenet. Where is the rest?

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

#123

Post by seeken »

POSSIBLE_FACT wrote: post #117
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…

it was in 1992 that i discovered what long distance calls actually cost, when my young dumb ass called up about 12 different non-local BBSes in search of more daily turns on Legend of the Red Dragon.. i didnt know modems would incur long distance fees just like phones... i was a special child

Also around that time that me and my friends learned what 'Extended Area' calling was- we all thought that if it was not long distance then it must be free! I remember us solemnly concluding that we would have to 'hack' the phone company. All of us also very special.

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

#124

Post by shagie »

bluGill wrote: post #106
the_af wrote: post #86

Earlier 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).

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…

> but once you figure out how to get on usenet (which I no longer know how to do!) it is a much better experience.

Get a reader and sign up on https://www.eternal-september.org

The days of open servers are gone, but fairly permissive authenticated servers exist.

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

#125

Post by throwaway847t »

chongli wrote: post #67
axus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they were talking about BBS interface vs. forums, and you're talking about Usenet (the actual topic of the article).

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

Sure, but the most common way to access Usenet/NNTP servers was through graphical GUI software or "TUI" for those that preferred terminals. Most people didn't write NNTP commands directly, although I did that because I wanted to learn the protocols (same with POP/SMTP/HTTP that are surprisingly easy to get started with)

NNTP worked great with dialup. You could connect and download all the new content since the last time you were online and catch-up offline without blocking the phone line. The clients were designed to work both in both online and offline mode

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

#126

Post by jll29 »

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…

I feel the same. Why can we not reactivate things?

For once, I'm going to hire someone to install me a local USENET set of groups for my research team, using e.g.:

  local.news
  local.research
  local.research.conferences
  local.research.papers
  local.research.ideas
  local.research.conferences
  local.research.experiments
  local.research.datasets
  local.research.tools
  local.systems
  local.social
  local.teaching
  local.admin
(I find NNTP servers needlessly hard to install. On the client side, there are many readers still embedded in Web browsers, but I prefer Emacs GNUS.)

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

#127

Post by dwheeler »

donio wrote: post #69
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…

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.

The comp.* hierarchy seems the most likely to have activity. It appears to me that comp.lang.ada has current discussions: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada

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

#128

Post by crznp »

pjc50 wrote: post #89
dredmorbius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "sp…

It was always "permissionless publish", but it is worth remembering that it wasn't a free speech system (until alt.*) Each group had a manifest of rules.

I think that the issue was that the enforcement mechanisms were largely social, so they broke down when it grew too large, especially when ISPs and others started running servers without engaging in the community.

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

#129

Post by jdporter »

dsr_ wrote: post #79
darau1 wrote: post #66

Earlier 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

looks cool, but D specific. how easy would it be to generalize this?

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

#130

Post by throwaway847t »

NoGravitas wrote: post #14
est wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Each instance could also choose which groups to distribute. Many ISPs didn't carry all groups (such as binary groups and groups in other languages) to save money, or due to the content itself (porn, warez, MP3). Sometimes they would have delays because some groups were only synced a few times a day.

This created a market for NNTP servers that provided full content for a monthly fee and sometimes even with a spam filter

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