Live data from Hacker News

USENET rises again?

theregister.com

101–110 of 235 posts

Re: USENET rises again?

#101
post #29

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.

I think you're coating your memory with a thick blanket of woke. I was also around in its heyday and the trolls were in full effect, and had already learned how to make women's lives hell.

There's a newsgroup still extant which is named after a woman who spoke up about the CSAM problem on our local university's server (I stumbled across it myself once, there was some nasty fucking shit going through there). The users of these groups did not take kindly to people messing with their access to pictures of children being sexually abused. Not naming her or the newsgroup because I'm sure she's long since gotten it in her rear view mirror.

Re: USENET rises again?

#102
I don't have any affiliation with any provider but I contribute or maintain most of the Usenet clients for Gentoo. As others have stated the majority of Usenet subscribers now use it for binary groups, not text groups. I use it for both. Rather than talk about whether it should or shouldn't come back I'm just going to give a starting point to view text groups. There's enough information on handling binary groups. (/r/usenet is probably a good starting point for info, SABnzbd is the binary client you'd probably want)

To get access: If you're looking to get into it and browse around, it's unlikely that your ISP provides free NNTP server access. Mine did when I first got into it in the mid-2000's but they don't anymore. https://news.gmane.io/ provides a free NNTP interface to just mailing lists if you're looking to test clients without paying money. If you want cheap access to all of it from a provider that has fully working headers, $2 will get you a 2GB non-expiring account at https://usenet-news.net/index1.php?url=home that should last a very long time for text groups.

As for clients, on mobile there's nothing available for android last I've checked. On iOS there's NewsTap, it's not the best app but it works. Main complaints I have is it fetches using single connection so it's slow to update large newsgroups and it doesn't appear to have a normal killfile support so you can't filter very well. This is honestly the main client I use for the few groups I subscribe to since it's convenient.

Thunderbird I'm told some people like. I can't recommend it at all, it has non-working TLS support for NNTP which seems like a joke but I assure you it is not. Going on 16+ years of ignoring RFC4642: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420262 The only way to workaround it beside using unencrypted NNTP servers is to run a local TLS proxy on your system or just use unencrypted NNTP connections.

Pan is an ok GUI alternative on Linux, it had fallen into severe coderot and at least Gentoo had dropped it but is actively maintained again: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pan My main complaint is it crashes from time to time. But it has working TLS so there's that. I've picked up maintaining it in the GURU repo as I don't feel it's stable enough to re-add to the main package repo yet.

Tin is probably the best CLI client. If you can get it started and connected to your provider it just works without fuss. Main gripe is the startup flags and having to manually write config file, it pretty much requires reading manpage. By default it'll connect to gmane though so you can mess around with that.

On Windows I've only really used Newsleecher briefly. It has a neat feature of having its own header index. This was useful because my main Usenet provider switched upstream providers and broke headers for most of my text groups. I could fetch articles from the server but without working headers I wouldn't know the articles were there in the first place. This is a side effect of most providers focusing on binary subscribers.

Spam is still an issue but it's less an issue than what it was. Most is easy to filter and there's only a few major spammers (like the dude ranting in allcaps Italian about politicians). The main 'spam' is clueless Google Groups users responding to 25 year old dead threads that it is unlikely your Usenet provider still carries. The biggest hurdle a new user will have is finding active groups. Some I'm in only get a few posts per year but are technically active (like the Thinkpad related ones). There's a few that get tons of posts daily.

Re: USENET rises again?

#103
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…

I haven't looked in a long time, but the last time I did look, there were any number of places you could connect to gratis, but which do not carry binaries groups. A non-binary usenet server is lightweight enough to run on the 80s Internet so the costs of operation without all that storage and retention is pretty minimal.

Re: USENET rises again?

#104
post #100
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

shhhhh

Re: USENET rises again?

#105
post #95

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…

https://easynews.com/

Re: USENET rises again?

#106
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…

> There is way too much friction

A lot of the early ISPs, 1993-early 2000s, had free nntp/usenet services. The "friction" of using usenet was not any greater that the friction of launching an email client, an ftp or gopher session, or launching Mosaic.

At the time there were many easy-to-use featureful nntp clients across most computing platforms. I remember liking MT-Newswatcher quite a bit as well as Nuntius. The UI of Newswatcher was not too different from an email client or perhaps directory browser.

Screenshots from MT-Newswatcher

  https://smfr.org/mtnw/screenshots.html

Re: USENET rises again?

#107
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 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.

Really? I'm old enough to remember when Google bought Deja, and with it suddenly came the ability to search the entire Usenet archive going back to its inception, through the Google Groups interface. Being able to search the archives of comp.lang.whatever was a great educational and productivity booster, like Stackoverflow before SO.

Re: USENET rises again?

#108
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

remember to use `nice` :)

it wouldn't be polite to scan the whole spool, just the groups that might bear results.

kibo was an anomaly

i had a shell on a big server for a while; i fed the hinterlands with selective feeds.

Re: USENET rises again?

#109

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?

Eternal September, mentioned in the article, is good. Another that I know of is https://solani.org/ .

Re: USENET rises again?

#110
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You could post to it for free, but it was extremely clunky.
Post reply on HN