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Ask HN: Who spends (or prefers to spend) more time on Usenet/IRC than on the web

3 points by taurusnoises 5y ago

Hey. I write a newsletter on humans and intentionality, and am interested in speaking with or hearing on here from people who either spend a lot of time on Usenet or using IRC, or who take strong anti-web positions and so chose to circumvent the web and instead engage with other Internet protocols like Usenet and IRC. While I've got a broad interest in the subject (interested in hearing whatever you'd like to share), I am especially interested in hearing from people who prefer Usenet/IRC to newer, web-based social platforms (Discord, Slack, etc). Especially if you have taken a strong stance either way. - What keeps you off the web and in non-web spaces? - What specifically about Use/IRC do you like?

anthk 5y ago
Add Gopher to the stack too. Gopher: Curated blog, sites, services and even news aggregators. No bloat, no JS, no waste. No ads. No clickbaits. Pure raw text. gopher://magical.fish, gopher://1436.ninja and gopher://sdf.org as my main source/portalish gopher holes. IRC: tech channels, sometimes news. Libera.chat it's my main network. No bloat, too, you don't need an i3/Core2Duo to talk to someone. Usenet: techgroups, delayed help available. No need to be online 24/7. You can pull posts once a week and everything will be fine. If you are a geek/nerd, you can code your own client on most programming languages in just two weeks. With something like TCL, Perl, Python or Ruby, a single week would be fine. The opposite is different. An IRC server requires maintenance, and INN can be crazy difficult for Usenet, but for Gopher it's dumb simple to set up both content and a server. And, yet, there are pubnixes and tildes oferring this even from SSH, for internal and federated use against other pubnixes. And it's amazing.
- taurusnoises 5y ago
  Thanks so much. I'll do that right now. So, it sounds like you're well versed in these worlds. If you don't mind me asking, is there a strong personal reason you choose to hang in these spaces over generic web spaces? Don't like being a part of the corporate web? Or is it the customizability? Or any other reason?
  - anthk 5y ago
    Less noise, and no issues on rendering on any machine since Intel i486, except for Gemini, where a Pentium II would be the bare minimum. Also, you can choose between lots of graphical clients for NNTP/IRC/Gopher/Gemini if you don't like the CLI/TUI ones.
    - taurusnoises 5y ago
      Thank you. I can totally see the benes of having those options.

3 points by taurusnoises 5y ago

anthk 5y ago

Add Gopher to the stack too. Gopher: Curated blog, sites, services and even news aggregators. No bloat, no JS, no waste. No ads. No clickbaits. Pure raw text. gopher://magical.fish, gopher://1436.ninja and gopher://sdf.org as my main source/portalish gopher holes. IRC: tech channels, sometimes news. Libera.chat it's my main network. No bloat, too, you don't need an i3/Core2Duo to talk to someone. Usenet: techgroups, delayed help available. No need to be online 24/7. You can pull posts once a week and everything will be fine. If you are a geek/nerd, you can code your own client on most programming languages in just two weeks. With something like TCL, Perl, Python or Ruby, a single week would be fine. The opposite is different. An IRC server requires maintenance, and INN can be crazy difficult for Usenet, but for Gopher it's dumb simple to set up both content and a server. And, yet, there are pubnixes and tildes oferring this even from SSH, for internal and federated use against other pubnixes. And it's amazing.

taurusnoises 5y ago
Thanks so much. I'll do that right now. So, it sounds like you're well versed in these worlds. If you don't mind me asking, is there a strong personal reason you choose to hang in these spaces over generic web spaces? Don't like being a part of the corporate web? Or is it the customizability? Or any other reason?
- anthk 5y ago
  Less noise, and no issues on rendering on any machine since Intel i486, except for Gemini, where a Pentium II would be the bare minimum. Also, you can choose between lots of graphical clients for NNTP/IRC/Gopher/Gemini if you don't like the CLI/TUI ones.
  - taurusnoises 5y ago
    Thank you. I can totally see the benes of having those options.