USENET rises again?
theregister.com
USENET rises again?
1–10 of 235 posts
Re: USENET rises again?
#2Am I missing the "rises again like a Phoenix" part? This article is just a brief description of what Usenet is, for people under 45 years of age. There's nothing in here about Usenet usage being on the rise, or anything like that.
This article talks about Google Groups in the present tense, even though its Usenet hosting permanently ceased around 8 years ago.
Re: USENET rises again?
#3Am I missing the "rises again like a Phoenix" part? This article is just a brief description of what Usenet is, for people under 45 years of age. There's nothing in here about Usenet usage being on the rise, or anything like that. This article talks about Google Groups in the present tense, even though its Usenet hosting permanently ceased around 8 years ago.
> "and now that there's an active board again, it has been busy."
Re: USENET rises again?
#4The news here is that a board oversees the "big 8" Usenet hierarchies has been re-established and is actively adding/removing groups.
"Rises like a phoenix" is a bit hyperbolic.
Re: USENET rises again?
#5As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used Usenet and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too much friction.
You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software. All of this to access what is essentially a pure text forum.
Frankly I am not interested in jumping through hoops to access something which an "average person" would have no hope in hell of figuring out. Maybe that's part of the attraction, that only dedicated geeks will use it?
Re: USENET rises again?
#6[deleted]
Re: USENET rises again?
#7Am I missing the "rises again like a Phoenix" part? This article is just a brief description of what Usenet is, for people under 45 years of age. There's nothing in here about Usenet usage being on the rise, or anything like that. This article talks about Google Groups in the present tense, even though its Usenet hosting permanently ceased around 8 years ago.
The Big-8 Board was re-established, or if you like, it rose from the ashes like a Phoenix. (The Phoenix story is about one bird coming back to life; there's nothing about an increase in the size of some group.)
Re: USENET rises again?
#8I never really understood how usenet works. There are usenet servers, and you post to usenet via these, right? Given there are O(100s) of servers (at least), I assume that the protocol between these servers is not full mesh, and there's some kind of small set of servers that participate in a mesh, and then followers that synchronize from them.
How does this synchronization protocol work? How does one join the mesh? I've read the wikipedia article, and it kinda talks to the topology and such, but not in great detail.
Re: USENET rises again?
#9I miss Usenet a lot, but the current state of play for "newsgroups" (sites like this, and Reddit) is way, way better than Usenet was. It's hard to see a real reason to bring it back.
Re: USENET rises again?
#10I never really understood how usenet works. There are usenet servers, and you post to usenet via these, right? Given there are O(100s) of servers (at least), I assume that the protocol between these servers is not full mesh, and there's some kind of small set of servers that participate in a mesh, and then followers that synchronize from them. How does this synchronization protocol work? How does one join the mesh? I…
It's a manually configured topology. An ordinary server would get a feed from somewhere else (probably their upstream ISP). A transit server would take dozens of feeds. The operation of each of those links is the same, though: `IHAVE ` and `SENDME `.