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Usenet was decentralized, and Google (amazingly) didn't ruin it. Dejanews was the last man standing and they were going bankrupt. Nobody wanted to pony up. I
by bsder 3y ago
Usenet was decentralized, and Google (amazingly) didn't ruin it. Dejanews was the last man standing and they were going bankrupt.
Nobody wanted to pony up. It's that simple.
Nowadays, a bunch of people have gigabit to their house. Colo is $400/mo for a cabinet and gigabit. 3U servers are under $500 and probably under $200 if you dig. I can go on.
You could resurrect Usenet easily, but nobody is doing it. Why? Because it's a pain in the ass. People forget that a lot of the early internet stuff relied on a bunch of people providing free labor (generally at universities) to keep it all afloat.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoHuh, I thought Groups was after Dejanews. Usenet was decentralized, but not in the current sense of the term IMO. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real protection against. I think the free labor issue could be circumvented by users having their own killfiles, and a fediverse approach of only syncing with 'good' servers.
- bsder 3y ago> Huh, I thought Groups was after Dejanews. Groups was contemporaneous with Dejanews. But Dejanews was basically going under when Google bought them. If it hadn't been for Google, Dejanews would have gone poof and we wouldn't have had any archiving of Usenet stuff at all.