My impression is that USENET is particularly censorship resistant. I suppose that's an advantage-- until someone starts to spam it.
USENET rises again?
21–30 of 235 posts
Re: USENET rises again?
#22If you want to read more about USENET through a criticism written while it was still used, I suggest to you the wonderfully anachronistic Unix Haters Handbook (https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf), it starts to talk about USENET at page 131
Re: USENET rises again?
#23As 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 n…
The "high" barrier to entry does act as a filter today, but I should add that in the 1990s, it was considered relatively easy, not so different from using email; it's only with the existence of modern social networks that the access steps seem relatively difficult. P.S. For many Usenet groups, you don't need to pay anything to get access.
It's still as easy as setting up email. You have a username, a password, and a hostname for the server. Then you're off to the races.
Re: USENET rises again?
#24Sounds like a fun weekend project would be to implement the Usenet client/server protocol in your language of choice, and maybe start your own federated Usenet server(s).
Re: USENET rises again?
#25As 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 n…
As a 51 year old programmer, you really missed out on some cool discussion back in the day. But yes, honestly, I haven't done anything Usenet in years save for the occasional Google result that lands on a Google Groups URL.
Honestly it might be worth resurrecting the protocol to run your own Usenet web UI just for weekend funsies.
Re: USENET rises again?
#26I 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.
I agree, the alternatives are mostly better...except for the interface. I'm not saying that Usenet was great, but damn Reddit is such an ugly site. I actually can't bear to look at it. Hackernews is pretty nicely designed though.
Every web-based message board has a better interface than the Usenet newsreaders did, if only because web message boards have more affordances for features than newsreaders do.
Re: USENET rises again?
#27I wouldn't consider Usenet a social network. 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.
Can you articulate the ways in which it seems not-a-social-network to you?
Comparison with reddit might be useful.
The only fundamental distinction I can draw is that there's no unified source of identity in usenet. All the rest of the differences come down to moderation policies.
Re: USENET rises again?
#28As 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 n…
Having been in the IT industry since 1992 - I did use a free Usenet server, probably provided by my ISP.
Used the "comp.*" heirarchy mostly, discussing technical topics and answering questions - in 1996, a publisher (Wiley!) sent me a box of books - apparently I had helped one of their authors and they wanted to thank me.
On-one-hand, I would like to try it again - OTOH, I think spam and/or bots would overwhelm it to the point of uselessness.
Re: USENET rises again?
#29I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers, etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary forums. I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.m…
The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. Don't like the politics? You wouldn't have liked Usenet in its heyday either.
Re: USENET rises again?
#30I 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…
These days, you join the Usenet by posting in news.peering and saying "I want to peer with somebody", or just emailing the Eternal September folks: http://www.eternal-september.org/index.php?showpage=peering
You configure both configure your servers to exchange messages and then... they exchange messages :)
It's good practice to have a couple peers, in case one goes offline or doesn't carry the groups you're interested in -- or filters things you might want. I run NoCeM on-spool and have stricter-than-normal CleanFeed rules, which translated from Usenet admin speak means my server drops a lot of spam and garbage posts, and if you want those you'll have to get them from another peer.