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USENET rises again?

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Re: USENET rises again?

#81

Post by PreInternet01 »

thenose wrote: post #70
PreInternet01 wrote: post #56

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…

Would you mind expanding on what you meant about BitTorrent? It seems like it's one of the few decentralized technologies that hasn't been ruined.

Is this a good-faith question, or are you truly not aware of the extreme scale of the copyright infringement that BitTorrent is used for? (And by that, I mean, that any BitTorrent use is automatically associated with excessive bandwidth usage and incoming legal threats, unlike, say, a usable P2P technology)

Re: USENET rises again?

#82

Post by BeetleB »

rsynnott wrote: post #44
BeetleB wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Was dejanews free? And could you access it with a proper news reader?

Google Groups's interface sucks by comparison.

Re: USENET rises again?

#83

Post by reaperducer »

mindcrime wrote: post #18

I 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…

sign up for a free Usenet provider

Any suggestions?

Re: USENET rises again?

#84

Post by pavel_lishin »

alexpotato wrote: post #72

I just recently started reading Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge and it's fascinating that he thought Usenet (or something VERY similar) would be how civilizations communicate with each other across the galaxy. (Granted, it was written in the early 90s but feels very apropos to see a post about it here on HN)

Given the time lag - even with FTL! - it still seems much more reasonable than Star Trek's flawless, synchronous video with automatic translation that works flawlessly and is never remarked upon (Unless the plot requires it).

Re: USENET rises again?

#85

Post by b112 »

pyrophane wrote: post #4

The 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.

A good read, but I'm pretty sure that there was usenet spam before then.

I was looking through my archives of old text files a decade ago, and noticed that, to my horror, in 1982, I had spammed Punternet for water filters I was trying to sell as a teenager. Punternet was like Fidonet, but for C64 Punter BBS systems.

And I'm sure someone spammed before me.

Amusingly, I received a reply from someone on Texas, which blew my mind in 82, in Canada.

Re: USENET rises again?

#86

Post by nostril »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #81
thenose wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind expanding on what you meant about BitTorrent? It seems like it's one of the few decentralized technologies that hasn't been ruined.

Is this a good-faith question, or are you truly not aware of the extreme scale of the copyright infringement that BitTorrent is used for? (And by that, I mean, that any BitTorrent use is automatically associated with excessive bandwidth usage and incoming legal threats, unlike, say, a usable P2P technology)

The fact that copyright infringement works in spite of attempts to kill it seems to be proof that BitTorrent is well-designed, rather than evidence it's broken. What else would it be associated with? People do use it to distribute large datasets, but even those have fallen into the infringement category.

And of course; good faith is all that we have here.

Re: USENET rises again?

#87

Post by reaperducer »

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…

You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software.

When Usenet was big, you didn't need a paid subscription. Almost every ISP included it for free.

I never heard of an indexer.

Client software came with your operating system, or it was built in to your e-mail client, or you could download for free.

As for today — yes, how awful that you might have to pay for something. Completely terrible. It might even be half the price of a cup of coffee. Completely unacceptable to have to give someone money for something of value. Terrible.

Much better to lock oneself inside the mink-lined, free, censored, AI-curated cages of the big data corps. Not thinking is always so much easier and more comfortable than thinking.

Re: USENET rises again?

#88

Post by pazimzadeh »

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…

Life was good when Unison was still being maintained

https://blog.panic.com/unison-2/ https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-unison/

https://www.astraweb.com is the best provider I know

Re: USENET rises again?

#89

Post by omoikane »

tptacek wrote: post #29
mindcrime wrote: post #18

I 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.

The organization of Fediverse is different, and availability of historical discussions is spotty.

Also, some quirky usenet groups aren't available elsewhere, such as alt.binaries.*

Re: USENET rises again?

#90

Post by tptacek »

queuebert wrote: post #67
tptacek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, 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.

Usenet was also censored. Like Reddit, much of it was a free-for-all, but not all of it.

But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's taking for granted really basic things, like search, that were space alien tech on Usenet.

Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse on Usenet.

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