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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)

#151

Post by rglullis »

shagie wrote: post #142
rglullis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sti…

> 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. In the domains of programming, suggesting that many of the 1% have moved away from Reddit, that is extremel…

> but it hasn't been sustained.

https://fedidb.org disagrees with you. Numbers are still going up, quite strongly.

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

#152

Post by shagie »

rglullis wrote: post #151
shagie wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. In the domains of programming, suggesting that many of the 1% have moved away from Reddit, that is extremel…

> but it hasn't been sustained. https://fedidb.org disagrees with you. Numbers are still going up, quite strongly.

In the context of Lemmy: https://fedidb.org/software/Lemmy

User count from a year ago is 30k to 48k.

Post count is from 181k to 241k

The content on the site is memes and jokes with occasional world news.

    https://lemmy.ml/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active
    https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active
I don't see this as sustained growth.

Mastodon is doing quite well. Lemmy... not so much.

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

#153

Post by PurpleRamen »

rglullis wrote: post #81
tgv wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sti…

69,828 Monthly Active Users is not what I would call a take off of something which will conquer the world, beat the capital and liberate the world from the evil of their control. It just this years hyped nerdspace. For example, it seems even significant smaller than this space here.

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

#154

Post by dsr_ »

jdporter wrote: post #129
dsr_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's written in D, and it's used to host the D forums, but it's open source, so you can run your own and pick the topics you like.

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

#155

Post by the_af »

hattmall wrote: post #149
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.

Both of those formats suck, but people moved there because the reach is strong with mobile access.

Yeah, I know what you say is true. But it sucks doubly: you cannot really have long, detailed conversations on Discord mobile like we used to have on web forums. Mobile favors typing short replies, usually memes.

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

#156

Post by rglullis »

shagie wrote: post #152
rglullis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it hasn't been sustained. https://fedidb.org disagrees with you. Numbers are still going up, quite strongly.

In the context of Lemmy: https://fedidb.org/software/Lemmy User count from a year ago is 30k to 48k. Post count is from 181k to 241k The content on the site is memes and jokes with occasional world news. https://lemmy.ml/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active I don't see this as sustained growth. Mastodon is doing quite well. Lemmy..…

Are we looking at the same data? For Lemmy, I see:

TOTAL USERS: 405,020

MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS: 69,825

ACTIVE SERVERS: 1,175

TOTAL POSTS: 1,558,916

> The content on the site is memes and jokes with occasional world news.

So is reddit. And you are forgetting adult content.

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

#157

Post by shagie »

rglullis wrote: post #156
shagie wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of Lemmy: https://fedidb.org/software/Lemmy User count from a year ago is 30k to 48k. Post count is from 181k to 241k The content on the site is memes and jokes with occasional world news. https://lemmy.ml/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active I don't see this as sustained growth. Mastodon is doing quite well. Lemmy..…

Are we looking at the same data? For Lemmy, I see: TOTAL USERS: 405,020 MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS: 69,825 ACTIVE SERVERS: 1,175 TOTAL POSTS: 1,558,916 > The content on the site is memes and jokes with occasional world news. So is reddit. And you are forgetting adult content.

Adult content is the third most active Lemmy instance. https://fedidb.org/software/Lemmy

I am not sure that one would claim that content creators are there rather than people copying content from various porn and making it accessible.

Do the graphs on that page suggest a substantial increase in the rate of content being submitted to Lemmy instances in the past year?

Memes and jokes are fine... if that's what you are after. I'll note that my /r/all page is devoid of most of them as the reddit subs that I'm on tend to not be as meme saturated.

If you are after deeper discussions of programming topics or hobbies, Lemmy doesn't seem to show the sustained growth or content being added that provides for interesting reading. https://startrek.website is probably the exception to this as they've maintained a rather focused set of communities and so it is easier to find content that isn't memes.

I haven't been able to find an equivalent of /r/DIY, /r/boardgames, /r/soloboardgaming, /r/books, /r/factorio (and its set of subs) on Lemmy.

If one wants to claim that the content creators of /r/memes have mostly left and gone to Lemmy... ok. I'm not as familiar with that subculture. If you want to say that the content creators of /r/books have left and gone to Lemmy - I have seen no indication of that happening.

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

#158

Post by bawolff »

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.

The last uucp service shutdown in 2012 according to wikipedia. So not just theoretically possible but was happening in actual pracitise much later than you would expect.

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

#159

Post by seabass-labrax »

squarefoot wrote: post #65
toyg wrote: post #49

> Ok so this is basically 10 people generating 11k messages per month. [...] they actively engage in conversations in their echo chamber and insult each other even though those they insult are the only ones who pay attention to them. I mean, what's the point?? 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. Or, t…

> 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@…

It could even apply to email - maybe some proportion of spam emails are just commands for botnets. Even if the email never gets past the spam filter on the user's inbox, it might trigger an action in the compromised MTA.

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

#160

Post by pmyteh »

billpg wrote: post #47

Is the formal group creation process still going on? You filed an "request for discussion" and if approved, there would be a discussion for a month or so. Then you'd file a "call for votes" and people would email their votes to a mailbox and there would need to be two thirds in favour. If not, just curious, what was the last newsgroup to be created this way?

Yup. The process is a bit different now, and under the purview of the "Big 8 Management Board", but new groups are still possible.

Last one was comp.infosystems.gemini in October '21[0]

[0]: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2021-10-22-result-comp.infosy...

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