Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
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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)
#2The timeliness of this article is that it compares Usenet to Mastodon.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#3Thanks 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.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#4I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of.
Usenet clients gave their users so much power, it's almost criminal that modern news readers have yet to catch up to them several decades later.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#5In addition to the `trn` and Gnus readers that the article mentions, another great one was `strn`.
They were much more powerful than any other forum interface I've seen since. Though the very compact thread views like in `old.reddit.com` and HN are nice.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#6I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of. Usenet clients gave their users so much power, it's almost criminal that modern news readers have yet to catch up to them several decades later.
Third party killfiles exist for Twitter. I was made aware of this via one particular topic. https://twitter.com/erininthemorn/status/1566988180678758400...
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#7Part 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 lot of load on your ISP. Even then, the NNTP server didn't carry much content, wasn't well maintained, didn't save much, so you had to pay more for a third-party server if you wanted to participate.
My hope for Usenet back in the day was a fully decentralized implementation that would allow each Usenet client to act as a client as well as a mini-server to cut the middleman out. Freenet (and I2P, I think) was sort of based on this idea at a very high level, but went in sort of a weird way (and didn't build on NNTP either).
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#8Part 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…
You are right the decent high retention + SSL NNTP providers cost at least $6/mo [0]. There are some free ones [1] but I have never tried them. I've heard they are sometimes slow and lack SSL. I liked the speed of Giganews for binaries but had problems canceling my account and had to call someone.
[0] - https://www.techradar.com/best/best-usenet-providers
[1] - https://teddit.zaggy.nl/r/usenet/comments/6l8h82/free_usenet...
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#9nn[1] commands are still like muscle memory 20 years after I stopped using it.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#10It's a bit strange how this article applies the past tense. Gnus still works fine, can be used to read mail, and despite some questionable design decisions such as line-based .overview files, can handle quite a bit of mail with its nnml backend. I don't use that much of Gnus functionality actually, but the threading, disappearance of messages I have read, and the ability to score down the occasional high-noise thread is well worth it. I cursed a lot when we switched to Gmail at work and the auto-creation of mailing list folders no longer worked (it's no longer predictable if list mail has a List-Id: header due to internal Gmail deduplication), but I found a reasonable solution to that as well (which I probably should write up and post somewhere).
Some even gate mailing list mail into a news server like INN so that they can keep using their favorite newsreader. Thankfulyl, with Gnus, that isn't necessary.