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For technical discussion groups: USENET. Either moderated newsgroups or even unmoderated ones for obscure enough topics. Spam is the issue, but not much spam
by jhallenworld 3y ago
For technical discussion groups: USENET. Either moderated newsgroups or even unmoderated ones for obscure enough topics. Spam is the issue, but not much spam on USENET these days.
Also, the ham radio guys like groups.io, which is where yahoo groups migrated to. There are a lot of groups there on specific things, like Yeasu FT-857D transceiver. Groups.io has per-group file storage, which is handy for this.
Anyway on USENET, you can access it via google groups, but it's a bit non-obvious. Here is an example group:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math
But how can you find groups? You click on "all groups and messages" on the top, then enter a search term and hit enter. Then click "outside my org". When I do this for the term "france" it shows "4635 groups outside your organization". Open the list and look for the groups that have "." separators, for example "alt.france".
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france
The ones without the dot separators are google groups- if you post, the message does not go outside of google. I don't know if you can create a USENET newsgroup through google groups- probably not.
It's kind of crap for discovery, but OK once you have a set of groups you use often.
Edit: actually a better way for discovery is a website like this: http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html
Once you have the name of the newsgroup, just append it to the groups.google.com/g/ (also the site provides a link).
- metadaemon 3y agoWasn't aware of groups.io for ham discussions, thanks for posting! For USENET, I think I know the answer, but are there other consumption methods that you know of/recommend?
- jhallenworld 3y agoI was a USENET addict- long ago I had a shell account on "world.std.com" (The Software Tool & Die)- they were the first dial-up ISP, located in Brookline, MA. Anyway at some point they stopped- by which I mean they stopped billing me and people moved on to the web. But for at least a decade they left the machine running, and I could use it no charge. So anyway, on a shell ISP, you read and post news with the "trn" command- "trn" is a text-only newsreader client. For discovery- well USENET was in the filesystem. So "comp.arch" is located in /usr/spool/news/comp/arch. So you could just "find" and "grep" to discover new groups. Also there was a newsgroups file that had the full list- I forgot the name of this. For the web today? I know there are for-pay sites, don't know any free ones. Maybe others do. Google groups was kind of good enough if you only frequented a few groups. You can use https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ with a newsreader client. See: https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-usenet-newsgroups/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-usenet-newsgroups/ I just tried it with claws-mail. Here is a quick start for Ubuntu (this feels like 1999): apt-get install claws-mail claws-mail it forces you to create a mailbox, don't worry about this (you can delete it later). Once you have the main screen: Configuration->Create Account Name of account: USENET Protocol NEWS (NNTP) News server: news.eternal-september.org Check This server requires authentication Fill in USER ID and Password you got from email after signing up with Eternal September and close. Now right click on mailbox USENET, select subscribe to newsgroup.
- RobotToaster 3y agoWorth noting that google censor a bunch of usenet groups from google groups.
- thesuitonym 3y agoAn interesting take on Usenet. I have a subscription for downloading binaries, but every time I've dabbled in text posting, I've found a few incredibly abandoned groups that are the exclusive domain of some of the most ridiculous spam I've ever seen. There are some NNTP servers that are not connected with the wider Usenet that I like (SDF, tildeverse), but of course they suffer from extremely small and niche membership.
- EamonnMR 3y agoHuh, SDF isn't connected to the wider usenet? Who knew.
- jimrob4 3y agoI was a big Usenet nerd, then switched to Reddit in the late aughts. Went back today and it was a ghostland, at least the stuff I used to frequent. Guess I need to look better, ha.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoI've only used Usenet in the past as a method of getting files, and later browsed it with Google. How do you browse it, how do you post to it, how is spam prevented?