USENET rises again?

Text-only newsgroup servers are free. You only need to use/pay for indexers if you’re scouring many groups for specific keywords.

If you’re subscribing to specific text groups you don’t need to search an index for the whole net. You can just scroll to the top and read what you missed since last session

The barrier of entry is learning how to use a piece of software like Thunderbird. It’s no larger than email. If you figured that one out, you can figure out newsgroups too.

I remember when everyone was deriding “the internet” and “email” as being too cumbersome for an “average person” to figure out, having too many “hoops” to jump through to use it.

Thanks for the nostalgia, wackget

I never liked Usenet, but when I was a teenager I posted some embarrassing, angsty, awkward messages in the alt.* space, so I was glad for many reasons when it rightly died off. If it rises, phoenix-like, I probably still won't use it. And if those messages (which I have searched for since) are recovered, I'll blame it on that one guy in Florida who has my same name.

The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content.

That was really one of the two things that killed Usenet in the 2000's. One was the rise of phpBB forums, and then Reddit. The other was the seediness of the Usenet binaries scene. As the "legit" users migrated to web-based forums, the pirates made up a larger and larger portion of those staying behind, and eventually the network effort flowed in reverse until critical mass was lost.

I deeply miss that old Usenet culture of the 1990's. In comparison to HN and especially Reddit, Usenet was far less reverent, frumpy, and up-its-own-ass politically and socially. At the same time, it's impossible to try to recreate that on a forum today, without it breaking down into nothing but alt-right hate speech. The 1990's was a fun and quirky little period of Internet sanity, made possible only by how small and outside the mainstream the Internet still was.

I'm not sure what an "indexer" is, such that you'd need to subscribe to it; is that some kind of online service like Deja News? I used to just download everything that appeared on the handful of groups that interested me, and store it locally. Then I could do local searches.

That "store locally" capability wasn't some bag of bash scripts I cobbled together; I thought all newsreaders could do that natively.