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Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

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Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#71

Post by readingnews »

throw0101a wrote: post #32
dsr_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks. At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe). So if you want Usenet, right now, every $5/month minimal VM that I'm aware of has more than enough CPU, RAM, disk and I/O to support you and two dozen friends, as long as you don't take binaries froups.

> At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe). How much of that was due to alt.binaries.*?

All of it. Like 90something percent of it. And I think you meant to say alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*

I was the sysadmin at an ISP in the 90s also. We spent the majority of our time talking about that NNTP server. Is it worth it? How do get purchase more disk when the SCSI bus is full and disks are crazy expensive? How do we get more CPU? How do we keep the load down at sync time? I think we spent more time talking about that than playing doom.

Still, Horny Robs BBS files were all on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hornyrob (or something like that) and well, that kept a LOT of customers happy, so we keep that pile of servers running.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#72

Post by secabeen »

desiarnezjr wrote: post #41
EricE wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an accident they sunk it :(

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 whe…

Still there, if you get your search terms right:

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.drwho/search?q=before%3...

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#73

Post by giantrobot »

desiarnezjr wrote: post #41
EricE wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an accident they sunk it :(

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 whe…

To expand on Dejanews' search (for the uninitiated), Usenet servers had limited retention. That was the length of time they'd keep a message on the server before deleting it. If I sent out a message a few months ago and you just checked the server today, it's entirely possible you'd never see my message. You might see more recent replies to my original message but your server might not have my old original message.

Because every Usenet server carried copies of messages each one determined its retention time based on the amount of storage the machine had.

Dejanews imported a bunch of old Usenet archives and ran their own servers which subscribed to everything and indexed it all. They were to Usenet what Google was to the web.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#74

Post by Narishma »

dsr_ wrote: post #12
commandlinefan wrote: post #7

Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don't pay a monthly subscription to them). Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a l…

In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks. At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe). So if you want Usenet, right now, every $5/month minimal VM that I'm aware of has more than enough CPU, RAM, disk and I/O to support you and two dozen friends, as long as you don't take binaries froups.

> In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks.

That's a feat, considering the Pentium II wasn't released until 1997, and the 400 MHz version late 1998.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#75

Post by dsr_ »

Narishma wrote: post #74
dsr_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks. At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe). So if you want Usenet, right now, every $5/month minimal VM that I'm aware of has more than enough CPU, RAM, disk and I/O to support you and two dozen friends, as long as you don't take binaries froups.

> In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks. That's a feat, considering the Pentium II wasn't released until 1997, and the 400 MHz version late 1998.

That might have been the successor, then. You'll forgive my memory at this range.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#76

Post by commandlinefan »

indymike wrote: post #64
throw0101a wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe). How much of that was due to alt.binaries.*?

> How much of that was due to alt.binaries. ? Most ISPs stopped carrying .binaries.* groups because of this.

I wonder how expensive it would be with today’s disk prices - I can’t imagine binaries.* have grown that much in size themselves.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#77

Post by icedchai »

commandlinefan wrote: post #7

Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don't pay a monthly subscription to them). Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a l…

There are free Usenet services out there (like aioe.org) if you don’t need binaries. Activity is pretty low though.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#78

Post by akadempythag »

commandlinefan wrote: post #7

Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don't pay a monthly subscription to them). Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a l…

The payments make sense, though. The market for Usenet providers and indexers is very capitalist.

You try to find the organizations who can catch and index posts from the people you're interested in, at the lowest cost.

It is uncomfortable, but I think the fediverse may need to be more ephemeral than most centralized social networks today. If you shout into the void and nobody hears you...a centralized network will archive your thoughts, but a decentralized one will let them die out as soon as your server does.

It may not be a bad thing. People will re-upload useful content and personally, I'm glad that my 12-year-old self's online musings are lost to the wind.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#79

Post by 8bitsrule »

iisan7 wrote: post #3

Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again. With buzz about moving to Mastodon, I was just thinking about why usenet couldn't be a viable social media platform as it represents so much of what people like about the fediverse, and then some. It would be fascinating to see the usenet protocol repurposed and new clients and newsgroups built upon lessons from the past decade.

Coincidentally, me too! Getting rid of exchanging binaries would keep traffic quantity much more reasonable (and civilized). Federation lets everyone see all the messages (no signing up-for). Named-topic forums is much better than searching for tags. (TIL also that Thunderbird has News built-in!)

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#80

Post by kkfx »

donut wrote: post #60
kkfx wrote: post #45

> 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 decen…

> have our PERSONAL aggregator That's the dream, isn't it. So if there are 100 people whose messages you willingly watch, how do you discover new people? (Maybe you do so organically when they mention them?) And if you _do_ allow yourself to taste from the firehose of unfiltered messages, a single personal list of users/messages wouldn't scale and you have the classic spam problem. Do you share your rules with others…

I answer indirectly: you probably know that most "manual tagging" is hyper-efficient compared to automatic one, and you probably here polemics about YT, Meta etc algorithms who push people toward extreme positions, apparently in neutral manners like yes, some video push toward political extreme right or left, but also some young girl video push toward younger and younger and so on..

So how to discover people? Well, in Usenet that happen at a slow but effective peace: you start to choose some groups you think to be interested in, the total number of groups is not that high and names are sufficient for a mere full-text search in a hierarchy. You start participate and others members write about some other groups "you might ask there", "try here" etc. In modern terms this is Reddit subs with a bit more discoverability and less abandoned groups. Since Reddit today seems to be effective enough that skilled people add "reddit" to most google search queries to find better contents...

Then the spam problem: at Usenet eternal september time antispam was limited, nowadays simple filters suffice AND we can import another piece of neglected IT evolution: the concept of PGP/GNUPG with their chain of trust. Or some will keep rotating usernames, some will keep them for decades. Those can share public keys signing each others in a classic chain-of-trust exchanging spam data automatically from their own client. Such approach is limited, but it's still better than actual "lists" for instance. It's still a cohort of people who decide BUT such cohort is not a for-profit company.

Long-story short even with current progresses expert systems are FAR to be near the human selection quality and actually it's possible to get partitioned human selection shared spontaneously to others. This is probably slower in discovering new stuff but bring most high quality results and avoid certain derives, so in the end is better. Actual volumes of posts often named "infodemia" needs to slow down and going up in quality. Eternal september do not show the limit of Usenet but the limit of a certain tech, we can plug-in more to surpass them and keep evolving instead of keeping reinventing the wheel with company-startup-alike experiments who keep duplicating similar concept just varying a little bit.

Competitive means from Oracle/CIA "different teams one against/semi-isolated to the others" produce some results, but a classic endless evolution of Lisp/Smalltalk systems the history prove produce MUCH better evolution because do not stop diversity, but allow diversity to merge and emerge. ALL "recent" IT evolution prove that countless times. ALL "recent" scientific trends do the same.

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