Toxic (of Toxcore) conferences seem like a great start, in some cases.
USENET rises again?
161–170 of 235 posts
Re: USENET rises again?
#162Earlier 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…
Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.
In Germany basically all ISPs never provided the binary groups, so piracy was never an issue. There also was no conspiracy to shut down the servers because of that.
And yet the German groups started a slow but steady decline after their peak in 2001: http://usenet.dex.de/de.ALL.html
I was active in the German Usenet back then and still remember that between around 2001 and 2005 the spammers and trolls took over and destoyed one group after another until they were completely unusable. I also mostly quit around maybe 2005.
So I highly doubt that Usenet would have continued to work if ISPs had just continued support it. Usenet only worked as long as everyboy was nice to each other, it would never work today without much better moderation protocols and tools.
Re: USENET rises again?
#163Re: USENET rises again?
#164Earlier 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…
Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.
It was expensive. I ran an ISP on the mid 90s, and it took up an expensive server and a disproportionate amount of my time to ensure we had good enough feeds for people to be happy, and so the moment demand was dropping it was very high on the list of things to get rid of.
Had peering been more on demand, rather than a firehouse, maybe people would have kept them longer.
I for a while worked on an aggressively caching NNTP server as an option because of the costs involved.
Re: USENET rises again?
#165The 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.
> "Rises like a phoenix" is a bit hyperbolic.
If it weren't hyperbolic and a tad over the top, it wouldn't be The Register.
Re: USENET rises again?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe the main reason usenet faded I believe it was due to AOL and CompuServe forums, which were most importantly, new, novel, friendly and easy. Technical people were "above" AOL and so those Usenet communities survived a few more years, but ultimately succumbed to web forums which were superior to Usenet in almost every way. Unfortunately, web forums were mostly hollowed out due to social media, and now that…
Just my opinion but I can't think of a single way in which I found web forums of the early 2000s to be superior to usenet.
Your opinion is, of course, valid, but you do recognize that it's shared by only a small minority, right?
Re: USENET rises again?
#167Earlier 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…
Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.
Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and most people back then were highly technical and could deal with the warts.
Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably never even knew it existed.
ISPs became client-less after broadband became widespread. ISPs didn't want to write or provide software, they just wanted to provide data over basic cable/DSL. Even AOL instant messenger eventually faded, as it never really adapted itself to a non desktop centric web.
Re: USENET rises again?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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+…
For forums over ActivityPub, there's Lemmy.
Re: USENET rises again?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.
Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and most people back then were highly technical and could deal with the warts. Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably nev…
Usenet doesn't have a UX by itself, it's a protocol. The user experience is entirely dictated by the software used to access it. And Outlook supported Usenet all the way from the word go. Macs didn't even come with any email clients back in those times, but popular ones supported Usenet and there were also Usenet-exclusive programs available.
Re: USENET rises again?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every web-based message board has a better interface than the Usenet newsreaders did, if only because web message boards have more affordances for features than newsreaders do.
> Every web-based message board has a better interface than the Usenet newsreaders did This is a fascinatingly different opinion I can't wrap my head around. To me it seems self-evident that every web-based or proprietary app message board interface is immensely worse than even the most primitive usenet reader of the 80s.
I'm with you. I really despise web based apps and I really loved having a native app experience with usenet. Google groups was a UX regression and I really would just love to have a native news reader again.