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Usenet over NNCP
- altairprime 3y agoNote that NNCP is GPLv3, for anyone who needs to know that.
- m463 3y agois usenet still alive?
- jtode 3y agoThat's the tunnel to Usenet. We don't go there anymore.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoYes it is, but only barely. Most of the posters are quite old and in a lot of groups when someone doesn't respond for a while, people become concerned for their health.
- keyle 3y agoI tried using it again after the Twitter thing, and oh boy, forget it. Alive yes, 12 headed dragons, yes. It's the mad max realm of the internet. I really wish it wasn't and that new standards would be on top and clear it up.
- bitwize 3y agoReally needs a code of conduct...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jgoerzen 3y agoYes. Many groups are pretty much dead, but there are some that are active (a handful that are QUITE active). The quality of the active groups ranges from "60% flames" to "these are Ph. D's talking to each other about things I will never understand". Though most, of course, are somewhere in-between. Compare this to Reddit however you like.
- Darthbuddha 3y agoCan you name a few I've been using usenet for over 4 years now with other pruporses but would love to delve into newsgroups.
- dsr_ 3y agoLive: rec.arts.sf.written -- discussion of written science fiction and fantasy Nearly dead, but if you post cogently, someone will respond: rec.audio.high-end -- discussion of high-quality (not necessarily high cost) audio reproduction
- jgoerzen 3y agoSure! alt.arts.poetry.comments alt.bbs.synchronet alt.comp.software.firefox alt.fan.usenet alt.folklore.computers alt.os.linux.debian alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst (This is somewhat low-traffic but is unique; people write in the third person imagining themselves stepping into a friendly coffeehouse) comp.infosystems.gopher comp.os.linux.misc comp.os.linux.networking comp.risks (moderated) comp.sys.raspberry-pi comp.unix.shell gnu.emacs.help rec.food.cooking (eh, 60% flames, 40% interesting) rec.music.classical.recordings (surprisingly active)
- jandrese 3y ago> comp.infosystems.gopher LOL. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the overlap in interests. You like one old fossil of a communication system you will probably like more.
- anthk 3y agoAlso: rec.arts.int-fiction rec.games.int-fiction rec.games.roguelike.nethack
- rikroots 3y agoSurprised to see alt.arts.poetry.comments on this list. Yes it remains active, but the regular posters there[1] are for the most part the remnants who triggered the Great Poet Flight to various online (moderated) forum venues 20 years ago. Some of those troll fights were fun. Some even involved poetry. Also: obligatory link to the Usenet Poetry Groups "Rogues Gallery" that I created prior to the Great Poet Flight: http://www.rikweb.co.uk/photos/rogues-gallery.html http://www.rikweb.co.uk/photos/rogues-gallery.html [1] - https://groups.google.com/g/alt.arts.poetry.comments https://groups.google.com/g/alt.arts.poetry.comments
- Darthbuddha 3y agoFunny none mentions piracy. I love being on hacker news but I don't understand 98% of the lingo haha.
- jgoerzen 3y agoThese servers don't carry the "binaries" groups. They carry the discussion groups, so there should be no piracy going on there.
- jandrese 3y agoAlso, games grew well beyond what would be reasonable to send over Usenet. There was really only a time in the late 90s when games were small enough to not require you split them into literally millions of parts. This happened to coincide with the maximum popularity of the Usenet, but as a distribution platform today it's just not practical. Still useful for music albums and DVD movies I guess, but as the parent post pointed out nobody carries alt.binaries anymore. The pirates have long since moved on.
- MiscIdeaMaker99 3y agoPorn was also a big thing in the binaries groups back in the day, specifically photos.
- bradknowles 3y agoAnd at Belgacom Skynet we had people dedicated to the task of finding the illegal photos and purging them from our systems. I sat next to Thierry who was doing a lot of that work. Poor guy. I caught only glimpses of some of the stuff he had to witness, and I would not wish that job on my worst enemy.
- piperswe 3y agoThere are plenty of full-size games and UHD movies being distributed over alt.binaries. Pirates pay to use newsservers that carry the massive alt.binaries.
- russelg 3y agoIt's incredibly alive thanks to piracy. Look at r/usenet for a peek of what people are doing with it nowadays. There are numerous sites which index binaries on Usenet, many use obfuscation to avoid DMCA/NTDs.
- manmal 3y agoObfuscation and quasi uncrackable passwords usually. The big problem being that when a .rar file goes missing (and not enough parity files were used), the download is dead forever but is hard to flag as such.
- ksherlock 3y agoEternal September, a popular nntp server, has some statistics on posting done through their server. http://www.eternal-september.org/postingstats.php http://www.eternal-september.org/postingstats.php The top 5 newsgroups for May 2023: it.politica, fr.misc.actualite.covid19, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, it.hobby.fai-da-te, uk.d-i-y I'm not sure what to make of that (aside from the large Italian/French contingent) but the top 10 includes some normal fare like rec.food.cooking, rec.arts.tv, and rec.bicycles.tech
- jll29 3y agoIs HN available (e.g. "comp.culture.hn") on USENET? It would be nice to have the Web forum be interoperable with a USENET group. The pull model (consume based on your topic/activity) of USENET newsgroups fits forum discussions much better than the "visit all pages you care about daily" Web model, IMHO.
- bluGill 3y agoThe usenet model also is much better for reading because it tracks what you have already read. If I come to this article tomorrow I'll see all the comments from today that I already read, and someplace mixed in there are new comments that came after I finished reading. Some of those comments are very insightful, but no web forum I've seen has any concept of "you already read this so we will make it easy to skip that by default". Technically USENET doesn't have that concept either, but all the software I have ever used to read it does, and that is what counts. (unfortunately all the software is local only so I can't switch between my phone and my desktop for reading - then again I haven't looked at USENET in 25 years so I don't know what is current)
- kitd 3y agoPrivate usenet is a much better model for corporate discussion than eg Slack and typical alternatives. More natural message threading, integration with email clients, binary and document handling built in. Not sure about search but easily done on client side. Private nntp servers never seemed to be a thing though.
- schoolornot 3y agoI tried setting up one of the open source servers and it was an awful experience. I dug around and it seems like most providers are using proprietary implementations or proprietary forks of servers that are no longer maintained. I was interested at the time in understanding how the big guys like Giganews and so on set up nntp, peering, storage, etc. Didn't get very far.
- mmastrac 3y agoI assume this is a usenet feed without binaries, because a feed with binaries would be a firehose of unimaginable proportion.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoYes NNCP Usenet feeds generally don't send any binaries, but nothing is stopping you from distributing those if you have the bandwidth to try.
- JdeBP 3y agoWas a firehose of unimaginable proportion. There's nothing subjunctive about it. (-: Interestingly, back in the days when Usenet was a big thing, the big nodes that carried the binaries newsgroups didn't use NNTP to exchange messages. There was too much latency in the protocol. They had duplex protocols that attempted to make the most of the link bandwidth in both directions. Going back to the UUCP distribution model is actually a step back from where NNTP was. Additionally, if one has a mechanism for reliably and securely distributing files, which is what NNCP is claimed to be, this does prompt the question: Why on Earth would one layer Usenet on top of it in order to do the same job of sending files around? Especially if it were the traditional Usenet model that didn't even include yencoding, let alone MIME and content signatures? Why would one care about binaries newsgroups if one already had a self-styled "darknet" binaries distribution system in place as the underlying transport mechanism?
- londons_explore 3y agoI thought this was about this NNCP: https://bellard.org/nncp/ https://bellard.org/nncp/
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoThere's a Matrix room for NNCP https://matrix.to/#/#nncp:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#nncp:matrix.org that's also bridged to #nncp on irc.oftc.net. It's pretty small and there isn't a lot of frequent activity there, but it's a good place to ask questions about the project or see what others use it for. jgoerzen hangs out there too!
- rakoo 3y agoNo usenet feed ?
- dsr_ 3y agoI keep meaning to try building DNews, which is a single backend with NNTP, web and mail interfaces. Matrix/IRC/Zulip/Slack are not fundamentally incompatible with Usenet so much as philosophically incompatible. It's the difference between casual mostly-realtime and expected delay.
- rakoo 3y agoI was mostly joking because the article is about using usenet so it would make sense to talk about it over usenet. I've never used Zulip actively but in my mind it actually was the bridge between mostly-realtime and expected delay, is that not the case ?