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USENET rises again?

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Re: USENET rises again?

#41

Post by rsynnott »

nikodunk wrote: post #37
mindcrime wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. For the most part, when people talk about "The Fediverse" they mean ActivityPub based sites. You could argue the point, since NNTP is "federated" as well, and one could certainly conceive of federating between the NNTP space and the ActivityPub space. I'm a Fediverse user, fan, and advocate (mindcrime@fosstodon.org), but I specifically mentioned Usenet, because th…

I’ve been very happy on the Fediverse (mastodon) since I took the plunge a few months ago. This is what the “early” internet at its best must have felt like. Real humans, technical discussions, random finds (painting!), sorted by created at desc.

> sorted by created at desc

Interestingly, this seems to be amongst the most controversial aspects; some people _hate_ it.

Personally, I was only quite dimly aware that Twitter had an algorithm now, like a common Facebook; until Musk ruined it I generally only really used Twitter via Tweetbot, so was getting a time-based feed anyway. So Mastodon was just what I was used to anyway. But more people than I expected actually liked the Twitter algorithm, and couldn't cope with Mastodon's lack of magic ML stuff at all.

Re: USENET rises again?

#42

Post by shagie »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #21

My impression is that USENET is particularly censorship resistant. I suppose that's an advantage-- until someone starts to spam it.

It depends on who's cancel messages you honor.

You'll likely want to honor the anti-spam ones as they're deleting spam. Most sites limit the sources of cancel messages they honor (and have checks to make sure that its you who are deleting your own messages).

Back in the day, censorship was an issue because everyone would honor everyone's cancel messages and, well, talking about a contentious political topic would likely have people attempting to forge cancel messages.

Re: USENET rises again?

#43

Post by mindcrime »

nikodunk wrote: post #37
mindcrime wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. For the most part, when people talk about "The Fediverse" they mean ActivityPub based sites. You could argue the point, since NNTP is "federated" as well, and one could certainly conceive of federating between the NNTP space and the ActivityPub space. I'm a Fediverse user, fan, and advocate (mindcrime@fosstodon.org), but I specifically mentioned Usenet, because th…

I’ve been very happy on the Fediverse (mastodon) since I took the plunge a few months ago. This is what the “early” internet at its best must have felt like. Real humans, technical discussions, random finds (painting!), sorted by created at desc.

Same. It's a bit "random" though. Maybe because the Mastodon world has generally resisted having good global search. And even though certain instances have broad topics (like sigmoid.social for AI/ML, or fosstodon.org for F/OSS) a feed tends to quickly fill up with plenty of random stuff.

With Usenet, if you join, say, comp.ai, you know that (spam aside) you're just getting AI stuff. Same for comp.linux, comp.lang.c++, or whatever. There's something to be said for the topic hierarchy there.

I see a place for both ActivityPub and Usenet, personally. Although, again, acknowledging that somebody could probably in principle build the Usenet style experience on top of ActivityPub. But as far as I know, that part doesn't exist today. If it does, somebody please let me know.

Re: USENET rises again?

#44

Post by rsynnott »

BeetleB wrote: post #39
StevePerkins wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article links to a free Usenet provider. I'm sure there are others also. 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 t…

> 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. This may reflect the state today, but back in the late 90's and early 00's, it was not. Even for th…

> But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere.

Unless they dropped it _really_ early, there was dejanews/google groups, surely?

Re: USENET rises again?

#45

Post by hollerith »

wackget wrote: post #5

As 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 someone who's spent many thousands of hours on Usenet (in the 1990s), my advice is not to waste your time.

Re: USENET rises again?

#46

Post by nullc »

The "fediverse" failed to learn from usenet and is doomed to repeat it.

Usenet's downfall came from no management of resource usage or abuse-management costs (both of the spam and the "that message is illegal" sort).

Sites dealt with mounting costs by outsourcing to specialists, which lost a lot of usenet's distributed advantages (e.g. local copies providing for ultra low latency access, availability during outages, traffic sharing when many users were using the same groups, only having to appeal to your choice of local authorities to carry something rather than distant ones that didn't get a crap about you, etc).

Due to overhead costs it's cheaper for fewer providers to support more users, this along with acquisitions caused the centralization onto a few and then essentially one usenet provider who then implemented policy (monetization schemes, walled gardens, censorship) that eliminated the residual benefits of usenet over alternatives. The alternatives were more flexible, and had less baggage (particularly the quasi-monopoly provider), and with no reason left to use usenet over them eventually they took over.

Re: USENET rises again?

#47

Post by rnk »

wackget wrote: post #5

As 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 article notes you can get a free read/write subscription at https://www.eternal-september.org/.

Re: USENET rises again?

#48

Post by karaterobot »

rout39574 wrote: post #27
karaterobot wrote: post #13

I 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.

I consider something a social network when it is designed to create and make use of a graph of relationships between people. This is distinct from social media, though we use the two interchangeably a lot of the time. The "network" part is about the graph of relationships, the "social" part is about people (and not servers, as I suppose is the case with Usenet).

I'm not sure about Reddit, I don't use it often, but if you can only follow forums and not people, I would not call it a social network either.

Re: USENET rises again?

#49

Post by hollerith »

rout39574 wrote: post #27
karaterobot wrote: post #13

I 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.

Moderation policies matter a lot. The tech behind Usenet makes moderation much more costly than it is on anything commonly called a social network (and the people running Usenet are opposed to moderation of anything other than outright spam or so that's how it always was when I stopped paying attention about 15 years ago).

Re: USENET rises again?

#50

Post by hollerith »

karaterobot wrote: post #48
rout39574 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I consider something a social network when it is designed to create and make use of a graph of relationships between people. This is distinct from social media , though we use the two interchangeably a lot of the time. The "network" part is about the graph of relationships, the "social" part is about people (and not servers, as I suppose is the case with Usenet). I'm not sure about Reddit, I don't use it often, but i…

"Social media" to me refers only to services owned and controlled by a corporation (or maybe a non-profit organization similar to how the Guardian newpaper is owned by a non-profit) and targeted at average consumers, not just techies. Although there have been corporations (e.g., ISPs, Clarinet, Deja News) involved with Usenet, no one (corporation, organization, person) has ever owned or controlled Usenet. "The Big-8 board is the closest thing it has to a central governing authority," says the OP, but it has only a tiny fraction of the level of control over Usenet that, e.g., Reddit, Inc, has over Reddit.

Before the rise of the web, Usenet definitely was the front page of the internet, though--to a greater degree than Reddit ever was.

Part of the nostalgia for Usenet I think is nostalgia for a time when corporations had very little influence on the internet. Although most of the people running Usenet (and maintaining Usenet software) in the 1980s and early 1990s were involved with software and the Internet as part of their job, running Usenet was not part of their job description.

IRC and the first massively-multiplayer online games (which were text-only and called MUDs) were the same way.

Till the early 1990s the US government paid most of the bills for running the internet, but used its influence very sparingly: there was a rule against commercial activity (which I think was motivated by appeasing commercial interests worried that the internet would compete with their services) and there were attempts made to make it less likely that the internet would get criticized by Congresspersons and journalists as an expensive waste of money: e.g., Jerry Pournelle's getting kicked off MIT's terminal servers circa 1985 out of fear that he would be careless in how he would write about the internet. And that is the extent of the rules imposed by the US gov that I know about.

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