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USENET rises again?

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Re: USENET rises again?

#191

Post by zzo38computer »

I use Usenet with Eternal September, and a NNTP client software I wrote by myself. I also have my own NNTP server for discussions of my own projects, although currently nobody else uses it than myself. (Both my own server software and client software support 63-bit article numbers.)

I think that NNTP is better than much of the newer too complicated and messy protocols. I also think is better than using mailing lists, too. NNTP also you can (like mailing lists, but unlike web forums) compose drafts on your computer and read messages that have already been downloaded, even if the internet connection (or the NNTP server) is currently not working, and then you can send/receive once it does work.

Re: USENET rises again?

#192

Post by bsder »

vidarh wrote: post #164
BearhatBeer wrote: post #146

Earlier 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.

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 cachin…

Yeah, people forget just how expensive both bandwidth and storage were in the late 1990s.

YouTube appeared in 2005 and was losing VAST amounts of money before Google bought them out. So, even in 2005, Usenet probably was still too expensive.

Re: USENET rises again?

#193

Post by listenallyall »

BearhatBeer wrote: post #187
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All you needed to do was search the group list for relevant terms. All the Usenet clients supported searching the group list - Group list - Usenet client Most people had no clue what that stuff was.

That’s another reason why Usenet was better. There was an IQ test to see if you were above 90 just to get going with it.

And Usenet died, to no small degree, because it was heavily populated by snobs.

Re: USENET rises again?

#194

Post by listenallyall »

jghn wrote: post #190
BearhatBeer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even easier, no web search needed. All you needed to do was search the group list for relevant terms. All the Usenet clients supported searching the group list. Then you just tick the checkbox and the articles were downloaded. Much much easier than using a search engine, scrolling through the results which were half ads even in those days, and trying out the 12 different forums you finally found which were even activ…

Exactly. When I got access for the first time in the early 90s it took me a few days to wrap my mind around it but after that I never had trouble finding groups of interest. Tools like search, built in group name searches, etc made it easy

...and about 2% of the population thinks Linux is an awesome OS, easy to use, loves the command line, prefers "grep" to clicking on a search box. Fortunately using an OS doesn't really depend on the participation of others, but a discussion forum that is widely viewed as inferior to some other option quickly succumbs to Metcalfe's law and empties out.

Re: USENET rises again?

#195

Post by BearhatBeer »

listenallyall wrote: post #193
BearhatBeer wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s another reason why Usenet was better. There was an IQ test to see if you were above 90 just to get going with it.

And Usenet died, to no small degree, because it was heavily populated by snobs.

It never died, it reach a low point of participation about a decade ago, and has slowly been gaining steam again ever since. Some portions of Usenet have always stayed active even through the tough times. As social media dies due to various reasons, people are coming back. Have been for years.

Re: USENET rises again?

#196

Post by beagle3 »

BearhatBeer wrote: post #169
chrisco255 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Outlook express supported Usenet, but Outlook did not.

That’s why I had to retire my company’s internal NNTP setup - because at some point, too many users were just using it through the web and email gateway that it was cumbersome and made no senses to keep it running.

Re: USENET rises again?

#197

Post by PreInternet01 »

jjav wrote: post #153
PreInternet01 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet was definitely slow (very, very slow, even), in the sense that posts made in the US might take up to 18 hours (or whenever dial-up got "cheap") to show up in the rest of the world, or vice versa. Even posts between locally-adjacent sites might take a few hours to propagate. This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter. But YMMV…

> (or whenever dial-up got "cheap") Right, but that was not due to nntp, it was due to the bandwidth economics of the times. I ran a small site that only connected once a day when the phone call was cheaper. But if you have a permanent connection largely unconstrained on bandwidth, it'll be faster. > This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say,…

> Right, but that was not due to nntp

No, but that's mostly because NNTP yet had to be invented (RFC977 is from 1986, a good 6 years after Usenet started, and was mostly used for client access, not backbone propagation, which was usually 'whatever cnews does' over UUCP).

> This is a very fundamental difference between a distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized walled garden.

Yet much closer to 'censorship' than whatever goes on at your typical walled garden today. The whole idea that Usenet was some sort of egalitarian free-for-all is just wrong: if you stepped out of line, you would lose your soapbox fast, often by an entire group/hierarchy/site being cut off.

But even if it did not get that far, the last response you would ever get on a group being plonk (the sound of being added to a killfile, often side-wide) was common. Besides that, *.moderated groups were also a thing, where messages would only be published upon manual approval from the group owners.

Re: USENET rises again?

#199

Post by listenallyall »

BearhatBeer wrote: post #195
listenallyall wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Usenet died, to no small degree, because it was heavily populated by snobs.

It never died, it reach a low point of participation about a decade ago, and has slowly been gaining steam again ever since. Some portions of Usenet have always stayed active even through the tough times. As social media dies due to various reasons, people are coming back. Have been for years.

> It never died

interesting, given that all your references to it are in the past tense

Re: USENET rises again?

#200

Post by BearhatBeer »

listenallyall wrote: post #199
BearhatBeer wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never died, it reach a low point of participation about a decade ago, and has slowly been gaining steam again ever since. Some portions of Usenet have always stayed active even through the tough times. As social media dies due to various reasons, people are coming back. Have been for years.

> It never died interesting, given that all your references to it are in the past tense

GP of the reply chain was referring to how at a point in the past Usenet was allegedly more difficult to access. That's why some of my responses were in the past tense - I was disagreeing about how, back then, it was more difficult to access. Hence the use of the past tense. All in perfectly proper English.
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