Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

Nope. :(

To add some context to those not from that era. Dejanews was the only practical way to search USENET at all, so it was effectively a USENET search engine with a crude web client. It was pretty darned crude, but was also much easier than the many NNTP clients. Most people I knew used both pretty effectively as USENET grew.

It was simple and functional, only to be slowly eroded by Google News.

Have no idea where Google News is now. But Dejanews was in many ways a Reddit for that era.

> Do you see how different this was from the infinite scroll of current social media web sites and apps? The idea was that your newsfeed would be updated periodically. Maybe hourly, maybe only once a day. And the goal of your newsreader was to let you be caught up and finished before the next time it updated.

How is that desirable? Why would you want to finish reading something that might already be obsolete?

> Killfiles and Scorefiles

That's one of the most important thing most people ignore: they means we can have our PERSONAL aggregator instead of using someone else algorithms and censorship. Sure at usenet time (or back at Xerox time where these concept was implemented for the first time in known history) the level of scoring and self-censoring technique was limited but nowadays it's a CENTRAL point. Usenet is a decentralized network no one own, no one can really censor at a whole and aggregators who are needed for anything high volumes are personal things, posts can be archived locally so they do not disappear and so on.

Coupled and integrated (like Gnus offer) with RSS feeds mails and in the case of Gnus also HN (nnhackernews backend) or Reddit (nnreddit) we can have a CONSISTENT and LOCAL UIs for ALL our public information/communication infra in a robust yet simple manner. That's the classic nuclear war resilient internet vs the modern centralized and censored web.

Oh BTW usenet today it's almost abandoned, but some have rediscovered it for mostly piracy as an alternative to bittorrent. It's relevant because it means that while normally binary groups in a modern world are a bit odd they perform well enough for such big file sharing usage.

Or, long story short: evolving these tools we can have a modern classic desktop who happen to be a human PERSONAL exobrain, work desk, tool, with the human at the center. With the modern web and relevant WebVMs we get instead modern dumb terminals of modern mainframes.

Do you prefer owning nothing "and being happy" like the infamous WEF/2030 video OR you prefer own your small slice of the world peer between peers?

Some of the most interesting and intellectually interesting conversations I have every had online were on USENET back in the 80's. I literally made friends all over the world in fields spanning areas from model aircraft to electronics, software development and aerospace. Met a bunch of them. Visited each others' homes. Etc.

Today? Geez. No comment. Every meaningful relationship I have online is from people I knew and met in real life, some of them a decade or more ago.

How was poster identity handled in Usenet/NNTP? From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy. Or was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their local server which require auth, you could see which server the message originated from and decide if the sender's address matched the server address...? It's been so long.)

If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a somewhat strong notion of identity.