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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)

#131

Post by flyinghamster »

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…

> 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.

Precisely. Usenet's "regulars" back in those days were generally IT staffers, with perhaps a professor or three, at any given school, or were IT staffers running news servers at their companies. The regular September flood of new kids discovering Usenet at school was annoying, but manageable.

Then the gates were thrown open wide, and netiquette got crushed under the weight of the general public. Once the crooks and con artists discovered it, it was the beginning of the end.

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

#132

Post by throw0101b »

the_af wrote: post #100
Sharlin wrote: post #93

Earlier 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.

> Cool! I didn't know threaded conversations were a concept from usenet.

Usenet and e-mail. Both message formats supported referencing the message being replied to since the early days:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc822#section-4.6

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc850#section-2.2.6

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading

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

#133

Post by throw0101b »

shagie wrote: post #124
bluGill wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For those that do not know the reference:

> Eternal September or the September that never ended[1] is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993[2] when Internet service providers[2] began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994,[3] leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#134

Post by flyinghamster »

pjc50 wrote: post #88
bawolff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, Usenet could go over dialup (or direct serial line) UUCP, not an IP address in sight.

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

throw0101b wrote: post #132
the_af wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Cool! I didn't know threaded conversations were a concept from usenet. Usenet and e-mail. Both message formats supported referencing the message being replied to since the early days: * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc822#section-4.6 * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc850#section-2.2.6 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by pyinstallwoes »

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.

In the original architecture yes it was closer to an ideal. If only Usenet became Xanadu. Unfortunately people gave way to the centralization of servers and thus lost control to the direction of the 'net. At least that's one take.

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

#137

Post by throw0101b »

taotau wrote: post #56
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…

Coincidentally, i bought myself a Synology NAS this weekend with the honest intention of using it mainly as a backup device, but while browsing the built in apps, i noticed a lot of the media download and streaming apps mentioned BT and NZB... took me a couple of seconds to realize what NZB referred to, but Im not really surprised that NZB has become an active protocol again, given how many consumer services make you…

> I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day.

Another thing that was sometimes done for BBSes was setting yourself up as a 'point node':

> As the number of messages in Echomail grew over time, it became very difficult for users to keep up with the volume while logged into their local BBS. Points were introduced to address this, allowing technically-savvy users to receive the already compressed and batched Echomail (and Netmail) and read it locally on their own machines.[23]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points

This was obviated a bit with the creation of offline news readers (e.g., BlueWave):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)

The equivalent to QWK for Usenet were SOUP files:

* https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Fo...

* http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/

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

#138

Post by the_af »

throw0101b wrote: post #132
the_af wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Cool! I didn't know threaded conversations were a concept from usenet. Usenet and e-mail. Both message formats supported referencing the message being replied to since the early days: * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc822#section-4.6 * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc850#section-2.2.6 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading

I wrote a lengthy reply and then deleted it because I realized that I too used threaded email conversations. I think I forgot about them because Gmail doesn't have them, and it's been ages since I used Eudora or Thunderbird. (Or text-only Pine, but I honestly cannot remember if it showed threads).

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

#139

Post by andsoitis »

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 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 simply copied the phpBB ideas because they've never seen anything better. So now we have to live with those "forums" where you can't find anything, and you have to wade through screenfuls of decoration just to see any content at all.

For a while, we had gopher, nntp, telnet, ftp, etc. but http/web ultimately provided a more general platform on which you could construct a wide variety of applications without needing to switch clients, removing friction and creating bridges.

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

#140

Post by pelasaco »

I loved newgroups, I'm just not sure how would it work today, because for sure people will come up with idea of fact checking it, or flooding it with fake news, or teaching why X is wrong and you should stop to talk about it. I remember that back in the days, conspiracy theory was ok, and nobody entered in other groups to teach people about the truth. We just knew it wasn't true. I wish it could still be like that today. I personally just left any discord, facebook, whatsapp group because of that.. soon or late, it become just about politics, agenda and who controls the rhetoric. It just sucks.
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