12 ms·

Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

165 points by carlesfe 3y ago

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible but share some properties? Etc
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi...> (I'm author of that piece. It seems to hold up pretty well with insiders' views, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36200045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36200045>. That last link is from an earlier discussion on Usenet's demise, of which there are several in HN history: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usenet https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usenet>)
  - benterix 3y ago
    I would add another important point: earlier, there was nothing like NNTP. So when someone showed you "the Internet", they showed you email, gopher (later the web), IRC and so on. These were separate services with unique features. The appearance of CGI and dynamically generated content was a big revolution at that time. Then, everything converged in the web, and when Google took over the newsgroups, there was practically zero incentive for new Internet users even learn what NNTP was.
  - anon35 3y ago
    Yup, all those. Also, at least for me: - it was slow - it wasn't consistent; not unusual that thread replies would be out of order - it was text only (essentially) - posting and downloading binary files was even slower and cumbersome)
  - fps_doug 3y ago
    > 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. This might strongly depend on the corner of usenet you were in, but there were large and important groups where elitism was absolutely cancerous, and a culture I don't miss. I frequented German end English groups, and can say that it was much worse in the German ones. Absolutely condescending attitude towards newcomers if they "misbehaved" even in the slightest; you'd have the "n00bs" post and then a dozen replies by the regulars circle-jerking by dissecting the OP down to every little detail they did wrong and trying to one-up each other in sarcasm. A typical flex was the length of your killfile. Web-Based bulletin-boards (phpBB, vBulletin, WBB, ...) quickly took over in the early 2000s, which had the advantage of having superior moderation tools (e.g. being able to remove spam after the fact), giving a more consistent experience to users. Bulletin boards still tended to have the elitist group of regulars compared to usenet, albeit less pronounced. Some/Much of this can probably also be attributed to the users of those boards being a new generation of Internet users, which just had a different approach and attitude, much like we see today with facebook vs. Instagram, YouTube vs. TikTok etc. What managed to mostly kill Internet forums was probably reddit, which improved SNR a lot by having the up/downvote system, and while technically being even more centralized than bulletin boards, managed to grow so much by basically allowing their users to create subreddits, which would equal the sub-forums in bulletin boards, which only the board's administrator could create.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      A significant part of the culture was that Usenet was tied, almost exclusively, to selective-admission universities (and largely CompSci / EE students and faculty), a few high-tech companies (infotech and defence, largely), and a few government departments. Those institutions could exert reasonable disciplinary control over Usenet participants ... enough to avoid the grosser harms. Yes, it was highly exclusive and exclusionary, and there were definitely toxic elements to the culture, but it wasn't entirely lacking in control or discipline as occurred later. Note that Usenet did have some effective spam controls ("Cancelmoose", the Lumber Cabal, etc.), but overall effectiveness was limited by virtue of the distributed and noncentralised nature of the protocol, as well as the lack of any true participant authentication. Slashdot was harshing on Usenet long before Reddit was, and various online forums (as you mention) before that.
  - gorbachev 3y ago
    There was more to it. 1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds 2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty 3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributors of the groups. When you searched for posts by someone, the first 100 pages were from these troll bots
    - bawolff 3y ago
      > The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds News clients were built into most email clients and were pretty user friendly. I dont think you needed to be a nerd to use it. Web forums were also pretty ugly in the late 90s.
      - throwaway847t 3y ago
        I agree. Windows 9x included Outlook Express which had a built in news reader in addition to mail. If you could setup your mail you could also setup the news reader. I think most of the ISPs that I used either had a setup program that configured it automatically along with mail/dns, or provided clear instructions on how to set it up manually. I may be in the minority, but I actually liked Outlook Express.
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        Netscape Navigator, the GNOME Pan newsreader, KDE's KNode newsreader, Forte Agent for MS Windows, and of course Emacs's Gnus, along with compatibility tools for a bunch of email clients (mutt, Sylpheed, Alpine, etc.). Most ISPs had some sort of bundled software package which included a rudimentary Usenet client as well.
  - rhplus 3y ago
    Also: It was insecure, there was no trust model and no encryption, so no proof of authorship, no proof of server identity. It was too public. Not everyone wants their conversations out in the open.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Whilst authentication was generally lacking, PGP was available and tended to be used for, e.g., security announcements. Not widely adopted, of course.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    This is the correct answer. Since it was a "permissionless publish" system, with no authentication, anyone could post anything. This was a disaster in the way that pure free speech systems always are. (To some extent, there was a natural response in that anyone could cancel anything, although those ended up adding authentication. At one point people estimated that a third of traffic was spam and another third was "spam cancels".) https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html (1998!)
    - crznp 3y ago
      It was always "permissionless publish", but it is worth remembering that it wasn't a free speech system (until alt.*) Each group had a manifest of rules. I think that the issue was that the enforcement mechanisms were largely social, so they broke down when it grew too large, especially when ISPs and others started running servers without engaging in the community.
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    > 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. Precisely. Usenet's "regulars" back in those days were generally IT staffers, with perhaps a professor or three, at any given school, or were IT staffers running news servers at their companies. The regular September flood of new kids discovering Usenet at school was annoying, but manageable. Then the gates were thrown open wide, and netiquette got crushed under the weight of the general public. Once the crooks and con artists discovered it, it was the beginning of the end.
  - amiga386 3y ago
    If you were to ask Usenet at the time, they would chiefly cite the eternal September (which you do mention in your article), although, clearly, it kept going for longer than that. Perhaps the eternal September is just one of the contributing factors to losing control of its shared culture and values? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Usenet as the principle locus of online group discussion phased out ... within a few years of the Eternal September. I'd argue that the shine was clearly off somewhere in the 1997--1999 timeline, which is roughly when the first discussion sites such as Slashdot emerged. Transitions aren't instantaneous, and aren't always clearly visible at the time. (Look at, say, the present ... evolution ... of Birdsite, The Front Page of the Internet, and the StackExchange empire.) But in retrospect inflection points become more clear. (This is pretty much a constant in all of history, with eras, transitions, and labeling of these coming years, occasionally centuries, after the events themselves.) The Eternal September was one of a growing onslaught of insults to Usenet which it ultimately succumbed to. Not instantly, but in time, and inevitably.
- serf 3y ago
  imo of course,but usenet had a hard time existing in a post-corporate internet exactly because it was difficult to wall off your users into your niche community, which became big in the early 90s and remains that way now. AOL/compuserve/prodigy/whatever offered easy to use and understand UXs which drew a large crowd, and their large crowd was in a fairly walled off portion of the internet using foreign protocols and systems -- so they drew in their friends and so on. same kinda thing fb does, among others, now. when the crowd/discussion moved elsewhere that was that. I think usenet saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity due to piracy, but the discussion has never really came back.
- darkstar_16 3y ago
  usenet needs a hosting provider. And providers would usually mirror a subset of feeds so yeah you could think of it as distributed but it is a much simpler protocol. Freenet is more complicated, p2p, encrypted, anonymous medium and also the main difference is in the way the data is distributed on all participants computers instead of one central server.
- est 3y ago
  > usenet was already distributed From my limited understanding, it's not "distributed" as you think It's "distributed" among ISPs. It's like one of the yourname@isp.com free emails, To run a usenet server, you need a server with public IP with TCP port 119 open. It's like running your own email service.
  - NoGravitas 3y ago
    Decentralized would probably be a better word than distributed.
    - throwaway847t 3y ago
      Each instance could also choose which groups to distribute. Many ISPs didn't carry all groups (such as binary groups and groups in other languages) to save money, or due to the content itself (porn, warez, MP3). Sometimes they would have delays because some groups were only synced a few times a day. This created a market for NNTP servers that provided full content for a monthly fee and sometimes even with a spam filter
- bcoughlan 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- mavhc 3y ago
  How do you add new features to a distributed system? Anti spam was the most needed tool, and it never arrived. Even if you just offer the ability to have 3rd party clients to your closed system you still have the problem of distributing new features, that's why there's only 1.2 browsers now
- ggm 3y ago
  Google offered to uplift the groups, and somewhat choked the model to death. I think Brad Templeton and others gave them tapes. (A good thing at the time) or maybe an early crate of disc drives got shared. A bunch of pre 90s data caches got uplifted and then silently seemed to vanish. I was a box admin in the UK in the early 80s and my honey-danber database records were online for a while in the maps Usenet group. They're not responding to search any more.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Google purchased the ailing Deja News and its archive, and the Spencer archives got donated to it as well with posts back to the 80s. But within a few years Google stopped caring about it entirely.
    - ggm 3y ago
      See? The best way to get good answers is to give bad ones and get corrected.
- sigg3 3y ago
  In my unqualified opinion the usability of e.g. phpBB forums (discussing through the browser) was much better than calling up a local BBS on telnet. Multilevel prompt menus in telnet can be quite maze-like. Web crawlers indexed online forums too, so you could find the content right away through the same search engine instead of having to search the BBS discussions for hours or post a request on the local BBS and wait (days) for replies. Your technically illiterate aunt could browse the search results for posts containing the recipes she wanted from a number of disparate forums, and choose to read anonymously (and print out) or login and contribute. All you need is an email address. This accessibility and semi-transparency created a major shift in where you go for content, effectively forcing the tech literate to follow suit as well. It fits in the general trend of democratizing the internet, and IMO was a good thing for tech. (I blame the monetizing and large commercial entities for the current state of fragmentation.) I still login to a local BBS about once a year to say hello. Although I have a shell account now so I don't need to telnet over the net. It's still very alternative and hacker friendly.
  - chongli 3y ago
    It feels silly to say this since it sounds like you’ve been using Usenet since the dawn of time, but you can get GUI-based news readers that fetch articles from your Usenet over the internet, no dialing up or using Telnet required. Properly configured, these news readers feel just like email clients, with threading and signatures and all that. Yes, the configuration part is some work but you only have to do it once and then you’re set up for all of Usenet. With forums you have to find and create an account separately for each one.
    - axus 3y ago
      I think they were talking about BBS interface vs. forums, and you're talking about Usenet (the actual topic of the article).
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 3y ago
- Nursie 3y ago
  Freenet is very different, it's a free-speech oriented protocol/server which provides a way to publish anonymously/untraceably and have the network host arbitrary content in such a way as you aren't supposed to even be able to tell what data is stored on your own node. Effectively a censorship-resistant and deniable publishing model. I haven't looked into it for nearly two decades now, but when I did it was full of CSAM and I decided I couldn't run a node in good faith. Usenet was great while it was a niche thing and before the advent of spam. It was distributed in the sense that most ISPs would run a server and they would mirror messages between them. You'd use your mail client to talk to your ISP's server, and messages would be like emails, but threaded somewhat like a forum. Binary files were usually uuencoded and often split across multiple chunks. Unlike solutions run by centralised entities, it really did feel like a public square, but your ISP could and often did decide which groups they would carry. On the flip-side your ISP or university could carry its own groups which weren't replicated out to the wider internet, for local discussion. It died for a few reasons but there were a few main reasons and mainest of those (lol) was that spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost, all actual conversation just got drowned out pretty fast. It had an undeath (maybe still does?) as a way to distribute pirated material, mostly because 'normies' didn't know about it and it would fly under the radar. All the movies on torrent sites would come from groups releasing them on usenet. I guess these particular users weren't affected by spam, and weren't a target for spam because no human was trying to read the groups...
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost Usenet readers supported plonkfiles; spam management on usenet was easier on Usenet than with email. A GUI Usenet reader let you plonk someone with a single click. Granted, in those days, spammers were less resourceful...
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  Anything that depends on an ISP is not truly distributed or decentralized. You'd need a way to route ad-hoc networks deterministically. You'd have to replace BGP with something like DHT. Yggdrasil is one example of this although it is an 'overlay' and not a direct protocol replacement. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io https://yggdrasil-network.github.io
  - bawolff 3y ago
    I think that is a silly definition, but doesn't usenet fit? It didn't start on the internet and supported rather arbitrary routing.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      USENET very much depended on ISPs in practice, they ran most of the servers! However, yes it was theoretically possible to have a route between two NNTP servers that wasn't over a BGP-routed chunk of internet but was "something else". Including posting a tape.
      - flyinghamster 3y ago
        Indeed, Usenet could go over dialup (or direct serial line) UUCP, not an IP address in sight.
      - bawolff 3y ago
        The last uucp service shutdown in 2012 according to wikipedia. So not just theoretically possible but was happening in actual pracitise much later than you would expect.
    - pyinstallwoes 3y ago
      In the original architecture yes it was closer to an ideal. If only Usenet became Xanadu. Unfortunately people gave way to the centralization of servers and thus lost control to the direction of the 'net. At least that's one take.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  It lived as long as people who used it were select technical elite. You know, people with genuine interests, using it to meet other, like minded people. But whenever people meet in unmoderated digital world, all sorts of other toxic people follow -- spammers, trolls, etc. People who don't care about the community or personal exchanges. This makes the place toxic and unpalatable to the ones who started it and so the real people just leave and the place dies.
- KolmogorovComp 3y ago
  As someone else said, usenet was replaced by phpBB forums, which kept the similar structure but were easier to moderate and easier to use too. The real question would be why did those forums mostly died nowadays? I don't have a definite answer, but from the user viewpoints: - Centralised services had the benefit of only creating one account (remember password managers were uncommon! People were advised only to create accounts of websites they would trust, to avoid leaking their passwords they often re-used) - More modern UI and the "new factor"/hype definitely helped people moving Let's not forget the move was also sometimes initiated by the webmasters, who did not want to pay and administrate it forever (Canonical example being a teenager spawning a forum about one of your hobby, then still maintaining it a decade later while having lost all interest)
- praptak 3y ago
  It died because running a communication platform for humans on the internet is hard. In particular it died because whatever moderation it had (almost none TBH) was no barrier to bad actors, so it drowned in spam and troll posts. Then the centralized social platforms took over with their network effects and moderation paid for from ads.
- bawolff 3y ago
  > I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? People like distributed things ideologically but practically speaking they have a ton of drawbacks. It failed because it was outcompeted by centralized solutions that could leverage their centralized power to make a better product (e.g. handle spam among other things). The decentralized aspect also means incentives can become misaligned where people who are paying for it aren't really benefiting or controlling it (i imaging alt.bibaries was not cheap to syndicate) > follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? No, and generally pretty unrelated.
- brador 3y ago
  Usenet was discussion and file sharing. Replaced with real time chat and forums, and kazaa/emule/napster/direct respectively.
jwestbury 3y ago
I guess alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die is dead.dead.dead.
dredmorbius 3y ago
"You know Usenet is almost-dead when there is not even spam in most groups." "Spammers have decided "it's not profitable to send a few bytes to these open boards anymore" and if you think about it it's kinda sad" As much as I hate spam, and I hate it a lot, yes, that's pretty damning evidence. You know a new comms platform has arrived when the spammers, scammers, griefers, and propagandists do. And you know it's dead when they don't even bother any more. (afr-l notwithstanding)
- amtamt 3y ago
  That can also mean its time to start using Usenet again... and should keep it under radar this time.
  - erremerre 3y ago
    Just like emule. Shhh
    - kur_einu 3y ago
      soulseek works fine too :)
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Unless there's a change in the underlying management, motives, incentives, and financial support model, those problems will simply resurface. And far more quickly this time than last.
larsbrinkhoff 3y ago
alt.sys.pdp10 is where it's at.
stOneskull 3y ago
it's like yahoo groups at the end
self_awareness 3y ago
It's a waste to lose all of the software that was used to connect to usenet. Today there's a small trend to write adapters of popular boards (reddit, lobsters) to NNTP protocol, so that this old software can be re-used (so that it's possible to browse reddit through an NNTP reader).
- rcarmo 3y ago
  Where are those? I'm game, would love to centralise some of those boards in a desktop client.
  - self_awareness 3y ago
    I don't think there is any real user-friendly app ready. But those are some prototypes/ideas: - https://github.com/taviso/nntpit https://github.com/taviso/nntpit (reddit to nntp) - https://gitlab.com/antekone/desugar https://gitlab.com/antekone/desugar (reddit/lobsters to nntp) - https://github.com/nkizz/mop3 https://github.com/nkizz/mop3 (mastodon to pop3) - https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/LobstersNntp https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/LobstersNntp (lobste.rs to nntp) (although reddit gateways probably stopped working after Reddit closed the doors to their API)
rglullis 3y ago
> The most similar thing to newsgroups today is Reddit, and I really enjoy following some communities. Which in turn will die and give way to Lemmy (generally ActivityPub).
- jdsalaro 3y ago
  I'm on Lemmy, but it's unfortunately too buggy atm. Having a blast on Tildes (Y) though.
- brettermeier 3y ago
  I just tried it. I created an account on a Lemmy instance. Now I also want to join other instances. But how to do it? I won't create an account for every instance, but I'm stuck now. So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't. Edit: And the instructions how to do it are buried away somewhere around two-thirds of the way through the text on this page (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html), with way to much text on it for normal users to read it all or to not stop caring.
  - PathfinderBot 3y ago
    > I just tried it. I created an account on a Lemmy instance. Now I also want to join other instances. But how to do it? I won't create an account for every instance, but I'm stuck now. Just like email, you do not need to create multiple accounts to talk to people from other servers, unless they have blocked one another. I am confused, I find it likely that HackerNews readers would know this. Perhaps you're making a point? > So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't. I'm sure this is a familiar argument to most of us here. People usually focus on technical solutions, making it easier, one-click, fool-proof. I fear that is a game corporations and centralised services have an advantage in. I have an alternative. It's not an easy solution, but a social solution to this would be to have "family sysadmins". Someone in the family who is at least slightly tech-savvy, helping the other members of the family set up their accounts. There is no need for the average person to understand federation or to be tech-savvy in this case. In other words, "help your family and friends with their IT stuff instead of putting them in the control of big corporations".
mrweasel 3y ago
Steve Gibson, regardless of what people might think of him, still runs his own usenet server and have a nice little community going.
glimshe 3y ago
First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was a lot higher. Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. Maybe because it's kind of ugly and scares away the average user expecting animated prompts and fancy style sheets. Speaking of BBSs, there is nothing today that quite captures the full value proposition of BSSs. Back in the day, you could sign up to one of them and meet a lot of locals due to the high long distance phone bills. I made a lot of "real world" friends, even a girlfriend or two, back in the BBS days.
- cmplxconjugate 3y ago
  I wouldn’t really say the visual aspect of HN really puts people off. I would argue that it’s more a function of discussion topics being more niche and technical. Ultimately the worst situation is when replies can consist of only a “joke” or meme (worst of all… a gif). Discussion is destroyed and instead replaced with a delta function; a single impulse response. “Click and move on”.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    GIFs require too much work, nowadays you only get a reaction - if you are lucky! Usenet was also niche and technical in the beginning, but that changed over time. Maybe the answer is multifaceted; Hacker News is a bit ugly, has a large percentage of technical users, strong moderation and lack of "low effort" features such as inline images, GIF libraries, reactions etc.
  - antupis 3y ago
    same thing happens at Reddit more niche topic -> better content. There is mainstream, then there is kinda messy middle where people are gatekeeping and it is kinda elitist place but when you go down enough in rabbit hole people start being just happy that you are sharing this hobby or topic of interest together.
barrysteve 3y ago
Carlos finds 11k posts per month about Rush Limbaugh by ten people trading articulate insults back and forth. He also asks, what's the point? They're the only people who will ever pay attention to it. I never did get into Usenet but the internet in the nineties and before was like that. Your online niche was a bubble of private elitism and secret joy that people wondered about, but never knew. You were ensconced and free. People were amazed and curious about the images and magical pull into the future, that people who knew how to work computers, could access in front of them. Your arcane knowledge of (what is now basic and made easy for us) connecting to the internet and plunging into this otherwordly language of buttons and code words... a different time. Contrasted to your father who wore a suit and tie to work at the bank and read the newspaper, and lived through the invention of the Television set. You didn't need a reason to shout into what we now call an echochamber, it held all the hope and promise of working out to some unknown magical end anyway.
pythondev42 3y ago
[dead]
jsnell 3y ago
The author seems to have been working alphabetically, and didn't even get out of alt (for me the thread stops at alt.f*). So it's not exactly delivering on what title of the HN submission promises. Is there more to the thread, actually looking at all 65k groups or a fair sample of them? Where can one find it?
- kryptiskt 3y ago
  He continues through it all in the rest of the thread.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    But there is no "rest of the thread" that I can see. Like I said, the thread ends at alt.f*. If there is more, how do you get to it?
- bembo 3y ago
  The thread continues and he actually got through all of them.
- fouc 3y ago
  you have to click on the corresponding message where the thread continues/forks from. Sometimes it's the last message, sometimes you have to go back a few messages. It continues again from here: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103470433583276145 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103470433583276145
  - distcs 3y ago
    I scrolled through all of it and it still ends at alt.* which is a minuscule fraction of all of usenet. Where is the rest?
    - Asraelite 3y ago
      You gotta keep clicking the individual posts at the end to continue the thread (I really don't like the Twitter/Mastodon format because of stuff like this). https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471067353770271 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471067353770271 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471732465361915 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471732465361915
billpg 3y ago
Is the formal group creation process still going on? You filed an "request for discussion" and if approved, there would be a discussion for a month or so. Then you'd file a "call for votes" and people would email their votes to a mailbox and there would need to be two thirds in favour. If not, just curious, what was the last newsgroup to be created this way?
- pmyteh 3y ago
  Yup. The process is a bit different now, and under the purview of the "Big 8 Management Board", but new groups are still possible. Last one was comp.infosystems.gemini in October '21[0] [0]: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2021-10-22-result-comp.infosystems.gemini https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2021-10-22-result-comp.infosy...
jwr 3y ago
I don't think the OP actually used Usenet back in the day. The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995. The comp.* hierarchy was rather good and that's where the action was. I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers simply copied the phpBB ideas because they've never seen anything better. So now we have to live with those "forums" where you can't find anything, and you have to wade through screenfuls of decoration just to see any content at all. What was also really good was that you had a single interface for accessing multiple groups. That's something we lost: if I have multiple interests today, I have to register for multiple "boards/forums", each one with different software, and I have to go around and check them all for new posts. That quickly gets problematic and tedious if you are interested in more than two things. I have a nagging feeling that we've dumbed things down terribly.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  Good times. News Rover was part of my life back then. I should note that the BINARY usenet is still on fire, if you know what that's used for, that is. My first experience with the Internet was via WebTV, and WebTV had a gated Usenet - only the users had access to it. It was just full of red hot, vicious flame wars. In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general. Take away the barrier of entry, let the masses in without any moderation, and it will turn into a cesspool.
  - jwr 3y ago
    I was a newsadmin back in the day. I hated the binary side of USENET. It brought nothing but trouble, and even on the technical side was a big load on the server.
    - boffinAudio 3y ago
      I remember turning on the modem bank of an ISP I helped build back in the day, with great anticipation to learn what the newcomers to the Internet were going to be doing with that amazingly fast new T1 line I'd slaved to get installed, only to discover after 3 weeks of logging that 95% of that fast connection was just being used to download porn, from our USENET server. Things haven't changed much since then.
toyg 3y ago
> Ok so this is basically 10 people generating 11k messages per month. [...] they actively engage in conversations in their echo chamber and insult each other even though those they insult are the only ones who pay attention to them. I mean, what's the point?? What if they were spies in the field, exchanging coded messages? Like posting classified ads in newspapers, it's one of those places nobody will look at. Or, they could all be Putinistas talking to each other, justifying their job of spreading propaganda. "Hey boss, I posted 3k messages just this month! Worth a few more rubles, right?!" Or they could be experiments, AIs talking to AIs. That's the most cyberpunk explanation, and Usenet being a '90s thing, it's hence the most likely.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  > What if they were spies in the field, exchanging coded messages? Like posting classified ads in newspapers, it's one of those places nobody will look at. I have wondered the same thing multiple times, having seen posts that either didn't resemble anything human generated, or were suspiciously crafted seemingly with steganography in mind. Spam itself could be used for that purpose; who would suspect that "6uy v1@gr@" from user XYZ read by an automated system that downloads groups regularly would actually trigger an action somewhere?
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    It could even apply to email - maybe some proportion of spam emails are just commands for botnets. Even if the email never gets past the spam filter on the user's inbox, it might trigger an action in the compromised MTA.
soniman 3y ago
Every successful social network will spend 95% of its life slowly dying.
RamblingCTO 3y ago
Now I want to write my own thing in go and host it just for the sake of it
runesofdoom 3y ago
"From posts here and elsewhere, I have some idea what a 'life' might be, and how I might get one. But, what is this 'offline'?"
superkuh 3y ago
I can't read this article because it's behind the typical mastodon post-v3 javascript execution wall. So... did they not notice the activity in alt.startrek somehow? I know I was posting back then with others and alt.startrek remains minimally active to this day.
pelasaco 3y ago
I loved newgroups, I'm just not sure how would it work today, because for sure people will come up with idea of fact checking it, or flooding it with fake news, or teaching why X is wrong and you should stop to talk about it. I remember that back in the days, conspiracy theory was ok, and nobody entered in other groups to teach people about the truth. We just knew it wasn't true. I wish it could still be like that today. I personally just left any discord, facebook, whatsapp group because of that.. soon or late, it become just about politics, agenda and who controls the rhetoric. It just sucks.
gbuechler 3y ago
I earned the down payment for my first house on misc.jobs.offered Had an client that I had an ongoing search contract to fill their needs for Unix Sys Ads at the NAS facility at NASA in Mt. View. Cool client that got me into playing Flight Simulator on SGI Power Series in their lobby.
nilespotter 3y ago
> but I think all downloads have moved to the web or p2p nowadays Yes, yes. That is correct. Move along.
Parker51 3y ago
Sample .newsrc file for recommended newsgroups: alt.computer.workshop: alt.culture.usenet: alt.fan.usenet: alt.folklore.computers: alt.obituaries: alt.os.linux.slackware: alt.privacy: alt.tv.simpsons: ba.broadcast: comp.ai: comp.arch: comp.compilers: comp.dcom.telecom: comp.infosystems.gemini: comp.infosystems.gopher: comp.lang.c++: comp.lang.c: comp.lang.forth: comp.lang.misc: comp.lang.perl.misc: comp.lang.postscript: comp.lang.python.announce: comp.lang.python: comp.lang.raspberry-pi: comp.lang.tcl: comp.misc: comp.mobile.android: comp.mobile.misc: comp.os.cpm: comp.os.linux.announce: comp.os.linux.misc: comp.risks: comp.sys.apple2: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action: comp.text.tex: comp.unix.shell: comp.windows.x: gnu.emacs.help: misc.legal.moderated: misc.news.internet.discuss: misc.taxes.moderated: news.admin.moderation: news.announce.important: news.announce.newgroups: news.groups.proposals: news.groups: news.software.readers: rec.arts.drwho: rec.arts.movies.current-films: rec.arts.sf.tv: rec.arts.sf.written: rec.autos.sport.f1: rec.aviation.soaring: rec.bicycles.tech: rec.food.cooking: rec.games.backgammon: rec.music.beatles: rec.music.classical.recordings: rec.music.opera: rec.radio.amateur.antenna: rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors: rec.radio.amateur.equipment: rec.radio.amateur.homebrew: rec.radio.amateur.misc: rec.radio.amateur.moderated: rec.radio.amateur.policy: rec.radio.amateur.space: rec.radio.info: rec.radio.shortwave: rec.sport.rowing: rec.woodworking: sci.astro: sci.electronics.design: sci.electronics.repair: sci.logic: sci.physics.relativity: sci.physics.research: talk.origins: uk.comp.sys.mac: uk.radio.amateur.moderated: uk.rec.sheds: uk.sci.weather:
evilbob93 3y ago
Hey what if we sent ai bots to talk to each other on Usenet?
jondiggsit 3y ago
The first rule of usenet....

165 points by carlesfe 3y ago

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible but share some properties? Etc

dredmorbius 3y ago
1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi...> (I'm author of that piece. It seems to hold up pretty well with insiders' views, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36200045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36200045>. That last link is from an earlier discussion on Usenet's demise, of which there are several in HN history: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usenet https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usenet>)
- benterix 3y ago
  I would add another important point: earlier, there was nothing like NNTP. So when someone showed you "the Internet", they showed you email, gopher (later the web), IRC and so on. These were separate services with unique features. The appearance of CGI and dynamically generated content was a big revolution at that time. Then, everything converged in the web, and when Google took over the newsgroups, there was practically zero incentive for new Internet users even learn what NNTP was.
- anon35 3y ago
  Yup, all those. Also, at least for me: - it was slow - it wasn't consistent; not unusual that thread replies would be out of order - it was text only (essentially) - posting and downloading binary files was even slower and cumbersome)
- fps_doug 3y ago
  > 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. This might strongly depend on the corner of usenet you were in, but there were large and important groups where elitism was absolutely cancerous, and a culture I don't miss. I frequented German end English groups, and can say that it was much worse in the German ones. Absolutely condescending attitude towards newcomers if they "misbehaved" even in the slightest; you'd have the "n00bs" post and then a dozen replies by the regulars circle-jerking by dissecting the OP down to every little detail they did wrong and trying to one-up each other in sarcasm. A typical flex was the length of your killfile. Web-Based bulletin-boards (phpBB, vBulletin, WBB, ...) quickly took over in the early 2000s, which had the advantage of having superior moderation tools (e.g. being able to remove spam after the fact), giving a more consistent experience to users. Bulletin boards still tended to have the elitist group of regulars compared to usenet, albeit less pronounced. Some/Much of this can probably also be attributed to the users of those boards being a new generation of Internet users, which just had a different approach and attitude, much like we see today with facebook vs. Instagram, YouTube vs. TikTok etc. What managed to mostly kill Internet forums was probably reddit, which improved SNR a lot by having the up/downvote system, and while technically being even more centralized than bulletin boards, managed to grow so much by basically allowing their users to create subreddits, which would equal the sub-forums in bulletin boards, which only the board's administrator could create.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    A significant part of the culture was that Usenet was tied, almost exclusively, to selective-admission universities (and largely CompSci / EE students and faculty), a few high-tech companies (infotech and defence, largely), and a few government departments. Those institutions could exert reasonable disciplinary control over Usenet participants ... enough to avoid the grosser harms. Yes, it was highly exclusive and exclusionary, and there were definitely toxic elements to the culture, but it wasn't entirely lacking in control or discipline as occurred later. Note that Usenet did have some effective spam controls ("Cancelmoose", the Lumber Cabal, etc.), but overall effectiveness was limited by virtue of the distributed and noncentralised nature of the protocol, as well as the lack of any true participant authentication. Slashdot was harshing on Usenet long before Reddit was, and various online forums (as you mention) before that.
- gorbachev 3y ago
  There was more to it. 1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds 2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty 3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributors of the groups. When you searched for posts by someone, the first 100 pages were from these troll bots
  - bawolff 3y ago
    > The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds News clients were built into most email clients and were pretty user friendly. I dont think you needed to be a nerd to use it. Web forums were also pretty ugly in the late 90s.
    - throwaway847t 3y ago
      I agree. Windows 9x included Outlook Express which had a built in news reader in addition to mail. If you could setup your mail you could also setup the news reader. I think most of the ISPs that I used either had a setup program that configured it automatically along with mail/dns, or provided clear instructions on how to set it up manually. I may be in the minority, but I actually liked Outlook Express.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Netscape Navigator, the GNOME Pan newsreader, KDE's KNode newsreader, Forte Agent for MS Windows, and of course Emacs's Gnus, along with compatibility tools for a bunch of email clients (mutt, Sylpheed, Alpine, etc.). Most ISPs had some sort of bundled software package which included a rudimentary Usenet client as well.
- rhplus 3y ago
  Also: It was insecure, there was no trust model and no encryption, so no proof of authorship, no proof of server identity. It was too public. Not everyone wants their conversations out in the open.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Whilst authentication was generally lacking, PGP was available and tended to be used for, e.g., security announcements. Not widely adopted, of course.
- pjc50 3y ago
  This is the correct answer. Since it was a "permissionless publish" system, with no authentication, anyone could post anything. This was a disaster in the way that pure free speech systems always are. (To some extent, there was a natural response in that anyone could cancel anything, although those ended up adding authentication. At one point people estimated that a third of traffic was spam and another third was "spam cancels".) https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html (1998!)
  - crznp 3y ago
    It was always "permissionless publish", but it is worth remembering that it wasn't a free speech system (until alt.*) Each group had a manifest of rules. I think that the issue was that the enforcement mechanisms were largely social, so they broke down when it grew too large, especially when ISPs and others started running servers without engaging in the community.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  > 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. Precisely. Usenet's "regulars" back in those days were generally IT staffers, with perhaps a professor or three, at any given school, or were IT staffers running news servers at their companies. The regular September flood of new kids discovering Usenet at school was annoying, but manageable. Then the gates were thrown open wide, and netiquette got crushed under the weight of the general public. Once the crooks and con artists discovered it, it was the beginning of the end.
- amiga386 3y ago
  If you were to ask Usenet at the time, they would chiefly cite the eternal September (which you do mention in your article), although, clearly, it kept going for longer than that. Perhaps the eternal September is just one of the contributing factors to losing control of its shared culture and values? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Usenet as the principle locus of online group discussion phased out ... within a few years of the Eternal September. I'd argue that the shine was clearly off somewhere in the 1997--1999 timeline, which is roughly when the first discussion sites such as Slashdot emerged. Transitions aren't instantaneous, and aren't always clearly visible at the time. (Look at, say, the present ... evolution ... of Birdsite, The Front Page of the Internet, and the StackExchange empire.) But in retrospect inflection points become more clear. (This is pretty much a constant in all of history, with eras, transitions, and labeling of these coming years, occasionally centuries, after the events themselves.) The Eternal September was one of a growing onslaught of insults to Usenet which it ultimately succumbed to. Not instantly, but in time, and inevitably.
serf 3y ago
imo of course,but usenet had a hard time existing in a post-corporate internet exactly because it was difficult to wall off your users into your niche community, which became big in the early 90s and remains that way now. AOL/compuserve/prodigy/whatever offered easy to use and understand UXs which drew a large crowd, and their large crowd was in a fairly walled off portion of the internet using foreign protocols and systems -- so they drew in their friends and so on. same kinda thing fb does, among others, now. when the crowd/discussion moved elsewhere that was that. I think usenet saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity due to piracy, but the discussion has never really came back.
darkstar_16 3y ago
usenet needs a hosting provider. And providers would usually mirror a subset of feeds so yeah you could think of it as distributed but it is a much simpler protocol. Freenet is more complicated, p2p, encrypted, anonymous medium and also the main difference is in the way the data is distributed on all participants computers instead of one central server.
est 3y ago
> usenet was already distributed From my limited understanding, it's not "distributed" as you think It's "distributed" among ISPs. It's like one of the yourname@isp.com free emails, To run a usenet server, you need a server with public IP with TCP port 119 open. It's like running your own email service.
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  Decentralized would probably be a better word than distributed.
  - throwaway847t 3y ago
    Each instance could also choose which groups to distribute. Many ISPs didn't carry all groups (such as binary groups and groups in other languages) to save money, or due to the content itself (porn, warez, MP3). Sometimes they would have delays because some groups were only synced a few times a day. This created a market for NNTP servers that provided full content for a monthly fee and sometimes even with a spam filter
bcoughlan 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
mavhc 3y ago
How do you add new features to a distributed system? Anti spam was the most needed tool, and it never arrived. Even if you just offer the ability to have 3rd party clients to your closed system you still have the problem of distributing new features, that's why there's only 1.2 browsers now
ggm 3y ago
Google offered to uplift the groups, and somewhat choked the model to death. I think Brad Templeton and others gave them tapes. (A good thing at the time) or maybe an early crate of disc drives got shared. A bunch of pre 90s data caches got uplifted and then silently seemed to vanish. I was a box admin in the UK in the early 80s and my honey-danber database records were online for a while in the maps Usenet group. They're not responding to search any more.
- masklinn 3y ago
  Google purchased the ailing Deja News and its archive, and the Spencer archives got donated to it as well with posts back to the 80s. But within a few years Google stopped caring about it entirely.
  - ggm 3y ago
    See? The best way to get good answers is to give bad ones and get corrected.
sigg3 3y ago
In my unqualified opinion the usability of e.g. phpBB forums (discussing through the browser) was much better than calling up a local BBS on telnet. Multilevel prompt menus in telnet can be quite maze-like. Web crawlers indexed online forums too, so you could find the content right away through the same search engine instead of having to search the BBS discussions for hours or post a request on the local BBS and wait (days) for replies. Your technically illiterate aunt could browse the search results for posts containing the recipes she wanted from a number of disparate forums, and choose to read anonymously (and print out) or login and contribute. All you need is an email address. This accessibility and semi-transparency created a major shift in where you go for content, effectively forcing the tech literate to follow suit as well. It fits in the general trend of democratizing the internet, and IMO was a good thing for tech. (I blame the monetizing and large commercial entities for the current state of fragmentation.) I still login to a local BBS about once a year to say hello. Although I have a shell account now so I don't need to telnet over the net. It's still very alternative and hacker friendly.
- chongli 3y ago
  It feels silly to say this since it sounds like you’ve been using Usenet since the dawn of time, but you can get GUI-based news readers that fetch articles from your Usenet over the internet, no dialing up or using Telnet required. Properly configured, these news readers feel just like email clients, with threading and signatures and all that. Yes, the configuration part is some work but you only have to do it once and then you’re set up for all of Usenet. With forums you have to find and create an account separately for each one.
  - axus 3y ago
    I think they were talking about BBS interface vs. forums, and you're talking about Usenet (the actual topic of the article).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 3y ago
Nursie 3y ago
Freenet is very different, it's a free-speech oriented protocol/server which provides a way to publish anonymously/untraceably and have the network host arbitrary content in such a way as you aren't supposed to even be able to tell what data is stored on your own node. Effectively a censorship-resistant and deniable publishing model. I haven't looked into it for nearly two decades now, but when I did it was full of CSAM and I decided I couldn't run a node in good faith. Usenet was great while it was a niche thing and before the advent of spam. It was distributed in the sense that most ISPs would run a server and they would mirror messages between them. You'd use your mail client to talk to your ISP's server, and messages would be like emails, but threaded somewhat like a forum. Binary files were usually uuencoded and often split across multiple chunks. Unlike solutions run by centralised entities, it really did feel like a public square, but your ISP could and often did decide which groups they would carry. On the flip-side your ISP or university could carry its own groups which weren't replicated out to the wider internet, for local discussion. It died for a few reasons but there were a few main reasons and mainest of those (lol) was that spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost, all actual conversation just got drowned out pretty fast. It had an undeath (maybe still does?) as a way to distribute pirated material, mostly because 'normies' didn't know about it and it would fly under the radar. All the movies on torrent sites would come from groups releasing them on usenet. I guess these particular users weren't affected by spam, and weren't a target for spam because no human was trying to read the groups...
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost Usenet readers supported plonkfiles; spam management on usenet was easier on Usenet than with email. A GUI Usenet reader let you plonk someone with a single click. Granted, in those days, spammers were less resourceful...
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
Anything that depends on an ISP is not truly distributed or decentralized. You'd need a way to route ad-hoc networks deterministically. You'd have to replace BGP with something like DHT. Yggdrasil is one example of this although it is an 'overlay' and not a direct protocol replacement. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io https://yggdrasil-network.github.io
- bawolff 3y ago
  I think that is a silly definition, but doesn't usenet fit? It didn't start on the internet and supported rather arbitrary routing.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    USENET very much depended on ISPs in practice, they ran most of the servers! However, yes it was theoretically possible to have a route between two NNTP servers that wasn't over a BGP-routed chunk of internet but was "something else". Including posting a tape.
    - flyinghamster 3y ago
      Indeed, Usenet could go over dialup (or direct serial line) UUCP, not an IP address in sight.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      The last uucp service shutdown in 2012 according to wikipedia. So not just theoretically possible but was happening in actual pracitise much later than you would expect.
  - pyinstallwoes 3y ago
    In the original architecture yes it was closer to an ideal. If only Usenet became Xanadu. Unfortunately people gave way to the centralization of servers and thus lost control to the direction of the 'net. At least that's one take.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
It lived as long as people who used it were select technical elite. You know, people with genuine interests, using it to meet other, like minded people. But whenever people meet in unmoderated digital world, all sorts of other toxic people follow -- spammers, trolls, etc. People who don't care about the community or personal exchanges. This makes the place toxic and unpalatable to the ones who started it and so the real people just leave and the place dies.
KolmogorovComp 3y ago
As someone else said, usenet was replaced by phpBB forums, which kept the similar structure but were easier to moderate and easier to use too. The real question would be why did those forums mostly died nowadays? I don't have a definite answer, but from the user viewpoints: - Centralised services had the benefit of only creating one account (remember password managers were uncommon! People were advised only to create accounts of websites they would trust, to avoid leaking their passwords they often re-used) - More modern UI and the "new factor"/hype definitely helped people moving Let's not forget the move was also sometimes initiated by the webmasters, who did not want to pay and administrate it forever (Canonical example being a teenager spawning a forum about one of your hobby, then still maintaining it a decade later while having lost all interest)
praptak 3y ago
It died because running a communication platform for humans on the internet is hard. In particular it died because whatever moderation it had (almost none TBH) was no barrier to bad actors, so it drowned in spam and troll posts. Then the centralized social platforms took over with their network effects and moderation paid for from ads.
bawolff 3y ago
> I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? People like distributed things ideologically but practically speaking they have a ton of drawbacks. It failed because it was outcompeted by centralized solutions that could leverage their centralized power to make a better product (e.g. handle spam among other things). The decentralized aspect also means incentives can become misaligned where people who are paying for it aren't really benefiting or controlling it (i imaging alt.bibaries was not cheap to syndicate) > follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? No, and generally pretty unrelated.
brador 3y ago
Usenet was discussion and file sharing. Replaced with real time chat and forums, and kazaa/emule/napster/direct respectively.

jwestbury 3y ago

I guess alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die is dead.dead.dead.

dredmorbius 3y ago

"You know Usenet is almost-dead when there is not even spam in most groups." "Spammers have decided "it's not profitable to send a few bytes to these open boards anymore" and if you think about it it's kinda sad" As much as I hate spam, and I hate it a lot, yes, that's pretty damning evidence. You know a new comms platform has arrived when the spammers, scammers, griefers, and propagandists do. And you know it's dead when they don't even bother any more. (afr-l notwithstanding)

amtamt 3y ago
That can also mean its time to start using Usenet again... and should keep it under radar this time.
- erremerre 3y ago
  Just like emule. Shhh
  - kur_einu 3y ago
    soulseek works fine too :)
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Unless there's a change in the underlying management, motives, incentives, and financial support model, those problems will simply resurface. And far more quickly this time than last.

larsbrinkhoff 3y ago

alt.sys.pdp10 is where it's at.

stOneskull 3y ago

it's like yahoo groups at the end

self_awareness 3y ago

It's a waste to lose all of the software that was used to connect to usenet. Today there's a small trend to write adapters of popular boards (reddit, lobsters) to NNTP protocol, so that this old software can be re-used (so that it's possible to browse reddit through an NNTP reader).

rcarmo 3y ago
Where are those? I'm game, would love to centralise some of those boards in a desktop client.
- self_awareness 3y ago
  I don't think there is any real user-friendly app ready. But those are some prototypes/ideas: - https://github.com/taviso/nntpit https://github.com/taviso/nntpit (reddit to nntp) - https://gitlab.com/antekone/desugar https://gitlab.com/antekone/desugar (reddit/lobsters to nntp) - https://github.com/nkizz/mop3 https://github.com/nkizz/mop3 (mastodon to pop3) - https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/LobstersNntp https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/LobstersNntp (lobste.rs to nntp) (although reddit gateways probably stopped working after Reddit closed the doors to their API)

rglullis 3y ago

> The most similar thing to newsgroups today is Reddit, and I really enjoy following some communities. Which in turn will die and give way to Lemmy (generally ActivityPub).

jdsalaro 3y ago
I'm on Lemmy, but it's unfortunately too buggy atm. Having a blast on Tildes (Y) though.
brettermeier 3y ago
I just tried it. I created an account on a Lemmy instance. Now I also want to join other instances. But how to do it? I won't create an account for every instance, but I'm stuck now. So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't. Edit: And the instructions how to do it are buried away somewhere around two-thirds of the way through the text on this page (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html), with way to much text on it for normal users to read it all or to not stop caring.
- PathfinderBot 3y ago
  > I just tried it. I created an account on a Lemmy instance. Now I also want to join other instances. But how to do it? I won't create an account for every instance, but I'm stuck now. Just like email, you do not need to create multiple accounts to talk to people from other servers, unless they have blocked one another. I am confused, I find it likely that HackerNews readers would know this. Perhaps you're making a point? > So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't. I'm sure this is a familiar argument to most of us here. People usually focus on technical solutions, making it easier, one-click, fool-proof. I fear that is a game corporations and centralised services have an advantage in. I have an alternative. It's not an easy solution, but a social solution to this would be to have "family sysadmins". Someone in the family who is at least slightly tech-savvy, helping the other members of the family set up their accounts. There is no need for the average person to understand federation or to be tech-savvy in this case. In other words, "help your family and friends with their IT stuff instead of putting them in the control of big corporations".

mrweasel 3y ago

Steve Gibson, regardless of what people might think of him, still runs his own usenet server and have a nice little community going.

glimshe 3y ago

First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was a lot higher. Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. Maybe because it's kind of ugly and scares away the average user expecting animated prompts and fancy style sheets. Speaking of BBSs, there is nothing today that quite captures the full value proposition of BSSs. Back in the day, you could sign up to one of them and meet a lot of locals due to the high long distance phone bills. I made a lot of "real world" friends, even a girlfriend or two, back in the BBS days.

cmplxconjugate 3y ago
I wouldn’t really say the visual aspect of HN really puts people off. I would argue that it’s more a function of discussion topics being more niche and technical. Ultimately the worst situation is when replies can consist of only a “joke” or meme (worst of all… a gif). Discussion is destroyed and instead replaced with a delta function; a single impulse response. “Click and move on”.
- glimshe 3y ago
  GIFs require too much work, nowadays you only get a reaction - if you are lucky! Usenet was also niche and technical in the beginning, but that changed over time. Maybe the answer is multifaceted; Hacker News is a bit ugly, has a large percentage of technical users, strong moderation and lack of "low effort" features such as inline images, GIF libraries, reactions etc.
- antupis 3y ago
  same thing happens at Reddit more niche topic -> better content. There is mainstream, then there is kinda messy middle where people are gatekeeping and it is kinda elitist place but when you go down enough in rabbit hole people start being just happy that you are sharing this hobby or topic of interest together.

barrysteve 3y ago

Carlos finds 11k posts per month about Rush Limbaugh by ten people trading articulate insults back and forth. He also asks, what's the point? They're the only people who will ever pay attention to it. I never did get into Usenet but the internet in the nineties and before was like that. Your online niche was a bubble of private elitism and secret joy that people wondered about, but never knew. You were ensconced and free. People were amazed and curious about the images and magical pull into the future, that people who knew how to work computers, could access in front of them. Your arcane knowledge of (what is now basic and made easy for us) connecting to the internet and plunging into this otherwordly language of buttons and code words... a different time. Contrasted to your father who wore a suit and tie to work at the bank and read the newspaper, and lived through the invention of the Television set. You didn't need a reason to shout into what we now call an echochamber, it held all the hope and promise of working out to some unknown magical end anyway.

pythondev42 3y ago

[dead]

jsnell 3y ago

The author seems to have been working alphabetically, and didn't even get out of alt (for me the thread stops at alt.f*). So it's not exactly delivering on what title of the HN submission promises. Is there more to the thread, actually looking at all 65k groups or a fair sample of them? Where can one find it?

kryptiskt 3y ago
He continues through it all in the rest of the thread.
- jsnell 3y ago
  But there is no "rest of the thread" that I can see. Like I said, the thread ends at alt.f*. If there is more, how do you get to it?
bembo 3y ago
The thread continues and he actually got through all of them.
fouc 3y ago
you have to click on the corresponding message where the thread continues/forks from. Sometimes it's the last message, sometimes you have to go back a few messages. It continues again from here: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103470433583276145 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103470433583276145
- distcs 3y ago
  I scrolled through all of it and it still ends at alt.* which is a minuscule fraction of all of usenet. Where is the rest?
  - Asraelite 3y ago
    You gotta keep clicking the individual posts at the end to continue the thread (I really don't like the Twitter/Mastodon format because of stuff like this). https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471067353770271 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471067353770271 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471732465361915 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471732465361915

billpg 3y ago

Is the formal group creation process still going on? You filed an "request for discussion" and if approved, there would be a discussion for a month or so. Then you'd file a "call for votes" and people would email their votes to a mailbox and there would need to be two thirds in favour. If not, just curious, what was the last newsgroup to be created this way?

pmyteh 3y ago
Yup. The process is a bit different now, and under the purview of the "Big 8 Management Board", but new groups are still possible. Last one was comp.infosystems.gemini in October '21[0] [0]: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2021-10-22-result-comp.infosystems.gemini https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2021-10-22-result-comp.infosy...

jwr 3y ago

I don't think the OP actually used Usenet back in the day. The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995. The comp.* hierarchy was rather good and that's where the action was. I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers simply copied the phpBB ideas because they've never seen anything better. So now we have to live with those "forums" where you can't find anything, and you have to wade through screenfuls of decoration just to see any content at all. What was also really good was that you had a single interface for accessing multiple groups. That's something we lost: if I have multiple interests today, I have to register for multiple "boards/forums", each one with different software, and I have to go around and check them all for new posts. That quickly gets problematic and tedious if you are interested in more than two things. I have a nagging feeling that we've dumbed things down terribly.

renegade-otter 3y ago
Good times. News Rover was part of my life back then. I should note that the BINARY usenet is still on fire, if you know what that's used for, that is. My first experience with the Internet was via WebTV, and WebTV had a gated Usenet - only the users had access to it. It was just full of red hot, vicious flame wars. In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general. Take away the barrier of entry, let the masses in without any moderation, and it will turn into a cesspool.
- jwr 3y ago
  I was a newsadmin back in the day. I hated the binary side of USENET. It brought nothing but trouble, and even on the technical side was a big load on the server.
  - boffinAudio 3y ago
    I remember turning on the modem bank of an ISP I helped build back in the day, with great anticipation to learn what the newcomers to the Internet were going to be doing with that amazingly fast new T1 line I'd slaved to get installed, only to discover after 3 weeks of logging that 95% of that fast connection was just being used to download porn, from our USENET server. Things haven't changed much since then.

toyg 3y ago

> Ok so this is basically 10 people generating 11k messages per month. [...] they actively engage in conversations in their echo chamber and insult each other even though those they insult are the only ones who pay attention to them. I mean, what's the point?? What if they were spies in the field, exchanging coded messages? Like posting classified ads in newspapers, it's one of those places nobody will look at. Or, they could all be Putinistas talking to each other, justifying their job of spreading propaganda. "Hey boss, I posted 3k messages just this month! Worth a few more rubles, right?!" Or they could be experiments, AIs talking to AIs. That's the most cyberpunk explanation, and Usenet being a '90s thing, it's hence the most likely.

squarefoot 3y ago
> What if they were spies in the field, exchanging coded messages? Like posting classified ads in newspapers, it's one of those places nobody will look at. I have wondered the same thing multiple times, having seen posts that either didn't resemble anything human generated, or were suspiciously crafted seemingly with steganography in mind. Spam itself could be used for that purpose; who would suspect that "6uy v1@gr@" from user XYZ read by an automated system that downloads groups regularly would actually trigger an action somewhere?
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  It could even apply to email - maybe some proportion of spam emails are just commands for botnets. Even if the email never gets past the spam filter on the user's inbox, it might trigger an action in the compromised MTA.

soniman 3y ago

Every successful social network will spend 95% of its life slowly dying.

RamblingCTO 3y ago

Now I want to write my own thing in go and host it just for the sake of it

runesofdoom 3y ago

"From posts here and elsewhere, I have some idea what a 'life' might be, and how I might get one. But, what is this 'offline'?"

superkuh 3y ago

I can't read this article because it's behind the typical mastodon post-v3 javascript execution wall. So... did they not notice the activity in alt.startrek somehow? I know I was posting back then with others and alt.startrek remains minimally active to this day.

pelasaco 3y ago

I loved newgroups, I'm just not sure how would it work today, because for sure people will come up with idea of fact checking it, or flooding it with fake news, or teaching why X is wrong and you should stop to talk about it. I remember that back in the days, conspiracy theory was ok, and nobody entered in other groups to teach people about the truth. We just knew it wasn't true. I wish it could still be like that today. I personally just left any discord, facebook, whatsapp group because of that.. soon or late, it become just about politics, agenda and who controls the rhetoric. It just sucks.

gbuechler 3y ago

I earned the down payment for my first house on misc.jobs.offered Had an client that I had an ongoing search contract to fill their needs for Unix Sys Ads at the NAS facility at NASA in Mt. View. Cool client that got me into playing Flight Simulator on SGI Power Series in their lobby.

nilespotter 3y ago

> but I think all downloads have moved to the web or p2p nowadays Yes, yes. That is correct. Move along.

Parker51 3y ago

Sample .newsrc file for recommended newsgroups: alt.computer.workshop: alt.culture.usenet: alt.fan.usenet: alt.folklore.computers: alt.obituaries: alt.os.linux.slackware: alt.privacy: alt.tv.simpsons: ba.broadcast: comp.ai: comp.arch: comp.compilers: comp.dcom.telecom: comp.infosystems.gemini: comp.infosystems.gopher: comp.lang.c++: comp.lang.c: comp.lang.forth: comp.lang.misc: comp.lang.perl.misc: comp.lang.postscript: comp.lang.python.announce: comp.lang.python: comp.lang.raspberry-pi: comp.lang.tcl: comp.misc: comp.mobile.android: comp.mobile.misc: comp.os.cpm: comp.os.linux.announce: comp.os.linux.misc: comp.risks: comp.sys.apple2: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action: comp.text.tex: comp.unix.shell: comp.windows.x: gnu.emacs.help: misc.legal.moderated: misc.news.internet.discuss: misc.taxes.moderated: news.admin.moderation: news.announce.important: news.announce.newgroups: news.groups.proposals: news.groups: news.software.readers: rec.arts.drwho: rec.arts.movies.current-films: rec.arts.sf.tv: rec.arts.sf.written: rec.autos.sport.f1: rec.aviation.soaring: rec.bicycles.tech: rec.food.cooking: rec.games.backgammon: rec.music.beatles: rec.music.classical.recordings: rec.music.opera: rec.radio.amateur.antenna: rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors: rec.radio.amateur.equipment: rec.radio.amateur.homebrew: rec.radio.amateur.misc: rec.radio.amateur.moderated: rec.radio.amateur.policy: rec.radio.amateur.space: rec.radio.info: rec.radio.shortwave: rec.sport.rowing: rec.woodworking: sci.astro: sci.electronics.design: sci.electronics.repair: sci.logic: sci.physics.relativity: sci.physics.research: talk.origins: uk.comp.sys.mac: uk.radio.amateur.moderated: uk.rec.sheds: uk.sci.weather:

evilbob93 3y ago

Hey what if we sent ai bots to talk to each other on Usenet?

jondiggsit 3y ago

The first rule of usenet....