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USENET rises again?

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Re: USENET rises again?

#91

Post by PreInternet01 »

nostril wrote: post #86
PreInternet01 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, OK, you're one of those people.

So, to rephrase things: because of you, Usenet is dead. And BitTorrent is dead. And any future technology anything like it will be dead-on-arrival, because you simply don't grok how the world works.

And I'm very well aware that "the way the world works" is in direct conflict with "the way you think the world should be working", but that's the exact issue here.

You are Eternal September, personified. Good luck with that!

Re: USENET rises again?

#92

Post by usrusr »

rjsw wrote: post #36
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…

I have a few people in my killfile so that I don't see messages from them but don't get much spam in the comp.* groups that I read. The threading and only seeing new messages is a lot better in my Usenet client than any web forum that I use, including this one.

"Including this one" is a good example, for how the rules of how content is selected for presentation define the medium. Even with exactly the same people, exactly the same dang occasionally nudging people this way or that way, this place would be an entirely different if the effective feed composition wasn't the one it is. So much of the identity of these online communities is an emergent consequence of the mechanisms employed.

Re: USENET rises again?

#93

Post by karaterobot »

hollerith wrote: post #50
karaterobot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 early on, there was no front page of the internet. It would have been your university's telnet or gopher server or something. But really there wasn't one. I don't think it was Usenet, certainly. With the early web, Yahoo might have been the closest thing. I don't think there could be anything like centralization or aggregation (I mean: a single place people went to by default) until the browser became ubiquitous, which in my personal history marks the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the middle phase of the internet. I agree that many people spent a lot of time on Usenet, but I think many more people couldn't be bothered.

I learned basic scripting by writing rooms and content for MUDs, I love them and sometimes wistfully think about starting one up.

Re: USENET rises again?

#94

Post by tptacek »

h2odragon wrote: post #79
tptacek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're taking for granted things like forum archive search that are table stakes now, but were space alien technology during Peak Usenet.

we just ran `grep` on the news spool directories Usenet with full access to a big server was fun. With just NNTP access, it was diminished. 3 to 6 hops out in UUCP/WWIV/FIDOnet land it was a different animal. Still of use but high friction.

I assume you were taking something less than full feeds, because on a full feed reader server, just keeping up with the inode demands for all the messages was a challenge; grepping would have taken for-fucking-ever.

Re: USENET rises again?

#95

Post by jtode »

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 spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight control, which is not a feature of usenet.

One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read.

Aggregators can occupy public keys as their "address" and any aggregator that gets obnoxious, you just trim it from your list, which only contains things you've either let in or accepted via slates or whitelists.

Then the spammers can do whatever they like, really.

I believe the main reason usenet faded so thoroughly was that it became a piracy distribution platform very early on (not sure which came first, the pirate booty or the porn booty, but I'm guessing porn), and very quickly there came a kind of unspoken "don't talk about usenet" code among those who already knew about it. At the time, Napster and bittorrent were the main targets of the authorities and IP trolls and usenet was just doing a Jim-From-The-Office-smirking-through-the-blinds.

Re: USENET rises again?

#96

Post by mindcrime »

reidrac wrote: post #80
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 Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one.

Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one.

It's been a while since I looked. I could have sworn there were at least a handful, but either A. I might be mis-remembering or B. the landscape might have changed since I checked last.

That said, there seem to be quite few who offer cheap if not actually free access. And by "cheap" I mean, on the order of $10.00 (USD) / month or less.

Re: USENET rises again?

#97

Post by turnsout »

I was on Usenet a lot up until the late 90s! I just did a quick search for Mac Usenet apps, and most of them seem oriented around file downloads.

Does anyone have a recommendation for an actually good native Mac Usenet app tailored for, like, normal discussion?

Re: USENET rises again?

#98

Post by mindcrime »

jonhohle wrote: post #51
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…

Is there a free provider you’d recommend?

No, see above: it's been a while since I looked at the usenet landscape. TBH, I'm tempted to set up my own, but I'm not sure I have the time/energy/money to deal with the peering stuff. But never say never...

Re: USENET rises again?

#99

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

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…

Back In The Day, the barrier to entry was low. Most Unix boxes had the "rn" or "trn" newsreaders installed, and VMS also had one (though I don't recall its name). It was as easy to get into as email.

Re: USENET rises again?

#100

Post by SSLy »

jtode wrote: post #95
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 spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight control, which is not a feature of usenet. One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read. Aggregators can occupy public keys as th…

It still does that.
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