61–70 of 235 posts
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I’m on infosec.exchange, our limit is 11000 chars. That’s more than enough.
My understanding is that "typical" Mastodon/ActivityPub instances limit you to on the order of 500. Certainly true for Fosstodon.
Am 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.
That's the rising again part.
If 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
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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…
> designed to create and make use of a graph of relationships between people.
I assert that a universe of people maintaining killfiles is exactly this. It is the default-trust map of social network, in which one imagines that the exceptional cases are those whom one wishes to shun.
I think a requirement that one be able to "follow a person", that is to say watch all the things that individual says, is excessive. We're getting down into the weeds here, but I think following topics and threads are much more useful than following humans.
Wow, it's like I'm reading a collection of everyone's spam folder with some flares of racism for good measure.
Is there _any_ moderation on Usenet? How do I get it?
For now I think I'll stick to Mastodon (Canadians, join cosocial.ca co-op!)
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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…
I think of IRC, Mastadon, and Jabber as social networks; If you rule out Jabber it seems to me you must also rule out AIM.
Perhaps we're fumbling for a new vocabulary term, and "Social network" is too vague to be effective.
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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…
Binaries also forced the centralization of Usenet, so that regional ISPs had no incentive to do anything but outsource it. It was unbelievably annoying to host a full-feed Usenet server in the late 1990s, and if you hosted anything less than one, people would arrange boycotts; better not to host Usenet at all. Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original.
Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods.
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…
Anyway, this is probably an even higher hoop to jump through.
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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).
I agree that moderation policies are important. But I think it's missing a point to decide that "A social network with bad moderation policies" is therefore not a social network. Easy comparison: Mastadon has distributed identity, and localized management of moderation. Is this sufficient that we should deem it "not a social network"? I think not. I think there was no real consensus in USENET towards the appropriate…
Good point. Something created for the explicit purpose of competing with (in the sense of taking users away from) a social network should be called a social network.
Usenet is and remains, if not entirely dead, at best a zombie. Killed by spammers first, AOL second and the people that would subsequently ruin BitTorrent, like, forever. Technology choices inspired by nostalgia are not always the best bet, but if you're going all the way, I suggest a return to FidoNet Echomail. http://ftsc.org/docs/fts-0004.001 should get you started, and I'm sure you'll figure out a way to make nod…