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USENET rises again?

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Re: USENET rises again?

#201

Post by listenallyall »

BearhatBeer wrote: post #200
listenallyall wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

bla bla bla, Usenet died because the "high IQ" (according to you) snobs on it were (are?) annoying as fuck posting these twisted explanations instead of accepting they were wrong about something

Re: USENET rises again?

#202

Post by ogurechny »

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.

> Subject: Free News Servers Listing

Web interfaces:

https://www.rocksolidbbs.com/rocksolid/article-flat.php?id=8...

https://www.novabbs.com/rocksolid/article-flat.php?id=715&gr...

Check the alternative hierarchies and connection options while you're at it.

The difference, I suppose, is that Google Groups are run by autopilot with nobody in the cockpit, Eternal September doesn't ask the average user too many questions (it is as accepting as its name suggests), but those small server admins will ask you questions if you start posting crap, and will delete it, and ban the account.

Re: USENET rises again?

#203

Post by joshjob42 »

tptacek wrote: post #113
nostril wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whatever your feelings are about copyright infringement, the fact is that it killed Usenet, by making it intractable for independents to run full-feed Usenet servers (it was simply too expensive, and the work to keep up with the binaries drastically reduced the quality of service for the text posts). The result was a system that really only served copyright infringement, because those were the users anyone seriously…

If people wanted to use Usenet for text then a service that didn’t offer binary groups should not have been a problem for people, right?

It seems rather that the value of the text groups was not high enough to get people to pay ~ anything as we scaled the internet and other text forums became widely available.

Text is ~ free. People typing at 180wpm only generate ~120bps of uncompressed text. A song is 2000x that, a video 10-100k x that. It seems like a model w paid barriers to entry to text forums is just not viable compared to free-to-the-user forums, or at least weren’t competitive when that ad-based model began.

I think it would be good for an open standard for text existed and was widely used, and didn’t rely on ads. But I don’t really see how logically one can blame the binaries for killing the text side of usenet. If people wanted to pay for text, they would have kept doing it. But as we’ve seen over the last 20 years, that business model has not generally worked.

Re: USENET rises again?

#204

Post by tptacek »

joshjob42 wrote: post #203
tptacek wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever your feelings are about copyright infringement, the fact is that it killed Usenet, by making it intractable for independents to run full-feed Usenet servers (it was simply too expensive, and the work to keep up with the binaries drastically reduced the quality of service for the text posts). The result was a system that really only served copyright infringement, because those were the users anyone seriously…

If people wanted to use Usenet for text then a service that didn’t offer binary groups should not have been a problem for people, right? It seems rather that the value of the text groups was not high enough to get people to pay ~ anything as we scaled the internet and other text forums became widely available. Text is ~ free. People typing at 180wpm only generate ~120bps of uncompressed text. A song is 2000x that, a…

It was a problem for everybody. You don't have to wonder about it: Usenet did consolidate down to a couple providers. People really did organize against providers that didn't carry binary feeds.

Re: USENET rises again?

#205

Post by Vaslo »

StevePerkins wrote: post #2

Am I missing the "rises again like a Phoenix" part? This article is just a brief description of what Usenet is, for people under 45 years of age. There's nothing in here about Usenet usage being on the rise, or anything like that. This article talks about Google Groups in the present tense, even though its Usenet hosting permanently ceased around 8 years ago.

Clickbait from that site? No couldn’t be…

I know tons and tons of nerds with extreme technical hobbies. None of them have ever talked to me about still using Usenet. The only place I hear about it is for Seedbox stuff.

Re: USENET rises again?

#206

Post by jjav »

tptacek wrote: post #186
jjav wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When I read comments like this, I assume the person writing it didn't spend much time in conversations on Usenet. It sucked. Replies would randomly go missing. They'd take hours to arrive. Nothing was searchable or findable. Replies would expire out in some arbitrary amount of time --- every server did this differently. There was no meaningful formatting. Because there was often no moderation at all, groups would get…

> When I read comments like this, I assume the person writing it didn't spend much time in conversations on Usenet.

You should not assume, does not lead to good conversation.

I've been nonstop on usenet since the late 80s, still am. I used to run a site for my university. I was a heavy poster and reader through the 90s. My usage volume has decreased, but still sometimes post. Read daily. Usenet rocks. Wish it had more participation, as it used to have. It is so much better than anything else we've come up with.

> you had only Gmail's interface and Gmail threading

Ugh, no, gmail threading is abysmally terrible. Something like trn is far superior.

Tell me how you can do any of these things in a so-called modern forum/chat app:

- Say I want to killfile tptacek? Ok, some apps allow blocking people, HN doesn't.

- Say I want to upscore posts from tptacek that mention crypto but downscore anything that doesn't. Impossible on any "modern" app that I know of.

- Say I want to pipe every post through my custom bayesian scoring filter. Impossible on any "modern" app that I know of.

- Say I want to pipe every post through a custom app that scans for key phrases I want to be alerted on, send those to my email.

I could go on and on. The sites and apps we are forced to use today are lacking 99% of the functionality that was trivially possible back in the 90s.

Re: USENET rises again?

#207

Post by jjav »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #197
jjav wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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'…

> No, but that's mostly because NNTP yet had to be invented (RFC977 is from 1986

I started on usenet in the late 80s, so my worldview always had NNTP.

> Yet much closer to 'censorship' than whatever goes on at your typical walled garden today.

This is not true at any level. Again, in a walled garden there is only one master, it's in or out, you are in or out.

Usenet is completely distributed, there is no center. Each site and each person can choose to not distribute or see certain things, but that has no influence outside their sphere of control. My site might no carry a given group, but many others do so I have choices. I might plonk you, but everyone else in the world sees your posts.

Re: USENET rises again?

#208

Post by kalleboo »

dmacvicar wrote: post #174
SoftTalker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while but I don't recall a ton of politics on the usenet groups I used to participate in (mostly tech subjects). Of course there were groups for politics, and sometimes a thread would go off on a tangent, but the nice thing about usenet is it was easy to killfile people or threads that you didn't want to read anymore. When I used it it seemed like it was mostly real names (.edu accounts) at least on the g…

Usenet was sorted by topic. Same people stick to the required topic in different forums.In the fediverse, you follow people, and therefore can't control very well what people post about. I follow some people because I am interested in technical topics, but I end muting some of those because some are very political, and I am not interested in some of these topics. I don't think the Usenet model can be replicated on to…

Lemmy is also built on ActivityPub as part of the Fediverse and is arranged into topics (called communities). E.g. you can follow retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org (or web interface https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/retrocomputing) and only see retrocomputing posts.

Since it's all ActivityPub, you can follow Lemmy communities from a Mastodon client but the UX in that case is pretty bad (e.g. Mastodon servers won't backfill posts so you won't see any history).

Re: USENET rises again?

#210

Post by reaperducer »

superkuh wrote: post #137
reaperducer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sign up for a free Usenet provider Any suggestions?

The free "10 GB" trial accounts available from usenet binaries providers can serve as a text only read/posting account for years. Like with usenet.farm

The free account on usenet.farm does not allow posting.
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