9 ms·

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. T

by 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.
    - zoky 3y ago
      Bro be acting like the motivation for getting the T1 installed in the first place wasn’t for porn… Remember what the Internet is for, after all.
      - boffinAudio 3y ago
        The T1 was for the customers. The 128k Ricochet modems were for me. ;)
- taotau 3y ago
  Coincidentally, i bought myself a Synology NAS this weekend with the honest intention of using it mainly as a backup device, but while browsing the built in apps, i noticed a lot of the media download and streaming apps mentioned BT and NZB... took me a couple of seconds to realize what NZB referred to, but Im not really surprised that NZB has become an active protocol again, given how many consumer services make you jump through hoops to use BT. I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.
  - tapland 3y ago
    I get NZB but BT?
    - dspillett 3y ago
      BitTorrent I assume.
    - nick__m 3y ago
      in context it appears to mean BitTorrent
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    > I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups. There was a very nice, easy-to-use NNTP server that was intended for small sites with few users, called leafnode. It is in a mature but still-maintained state. https://www.leafnode.org/status.shtml https://www.leafnode.org/status.shtml I ran it on a laptop so I could slurp up my newsgroups and read them on the train with tin.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    > I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. Another thing that was sometimes done for BBSes was setting yourself up as a 'point node': > As the number of messages in Echomail grew over time, it became very difficult for users to keep up with the volume while logged into their local BBS. Points were introduced to address this, allowing technically-savvy users to receive the already compressed and batched Echomail (and Netmail) and read it locally on their own machines.[23] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points This was obviated a bit with the creation of offline news readers (e.g., BlueWave): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) The equivalent to QWK for Usenet were SOUP files: * https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Format_(SOUP)_Version_1.2 https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Fo... * http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/
- quaddo 3y ago
  I remember when the news came out that AOL was going to connect/gateway to the internet at large. There was a concerned expectation that there would be a distinct drop in the quality of USENET posts. They did not disappoint.
  - prometheus76 3y ago
    It's called Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- Johnythree 3y ago
  > 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. So much this. So many brilliant forums began to die as they were flooded with arrogant and foul-mouthed 13 year olds who thought it great fun to flame everybody. Gradually each of the ancient users who had contributed so much eventually logged out, never to reappear. That and the new breed of Moderators who actively encouraged the trolls based on "any engagement is good".
darau1 3y ago
I still stubbornly hope that one of these silicone valley boys will "invent" USENET, and package it up nicely for the masses. That'd be cool.
- throwaway847t 3y ago
  Several boards use open source software, so in theory one could develop a "bridge" to Mastodon, Slack, Discord or something similar.
- dsr_ 3y ago
  https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed README: DFeed is: an NNTP client a mailing list archive a forum-like web interface an ATOM aggregator an IRC bot
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    They should add in Matrix, Mastodon, and Lemmy support for good measure :P
  - mavhc 3y ago
    That seems to turn usenet into a forum
    - dsr_ 3y ago
      It's a multilegged bridge: any of the two-way methods are views and updates into the same dataset.
  - jdporter 3y ago
    looks cool, but D specific. how easy would it be to generalize this?
    - dsr_ 3y ago
      It's written in D, and it's used to host the D forums, but it's open source, so you can run your own and pick the topics you like.
throwaway847t 3y ago
> and I have to go around and check them all for new posts Some boards support RSS/Atom, and it will help finding new posts. It is not as good as the old usenet readers, but at least you save some time.
donio 3y ago
Some comp.* groups get reasonable traffic even today although naturally it's mostly the same regulars. And I know of at least a couple of alt.* and rec.* groups that are worth checking on occasion. And there are some others that are kept alive through google groups traffic. And then there is GMANE.
- dwheeler 3y ago
  The comp.* hierarchy seems the most likely to have activity. It appears to me that comp.lang.ada has current discussions: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada
the_af 3y ago
> So now we have to live with those "forums" Which forums do you mean? Every community I was part of has moved to facebook groups, Reddit or Discord. PhpBB has gone the way of the dodo (regrettably, since those were the "good old days" for me, since I never used usenet).
- SirMaster 3y ago
  Well it’s a lot of XenForo now. But I go on AVSForums a lot and Linus tech tips forum and [H]ardforum, etc.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  There are many forums for specific communities: specific car brands, sometimes even specific car models, watches, keyboards even (!), etc. I'm on forums like these and they're doing totally fine. And if anything with the recent Reddit SNAFU the last thing users there want is for some central authority in SV to decide what they're allowed to talk about.
  - the_af 3y ago
    Ah, interesting. To be clear, I also meant for specific communities: like for specific hobbies or tabletop games, or niche interests. They've all abandoned forums and, regrettably, moved on to Facebook or Discord. I'll never understand why they choose Discord, a closed chat platform, for forum type discussions. At this point I feel like Quixote tilting at the wind mills.
    - Ringz 3y ago
      I don't understand that either. Discord feels like a hamster wheel connected to a turbocharger.
    - readingnews 3y ago
      I am not so sure they all went FB/Discord, some I use(d) for example: https://www.watchuseek.com/ https://www.watchuseek.com/ https://www.rolexforums.com/ https://www.rolexforums.com/ https://www.audioasylum.com/ https://www.audioasylum.com/ https://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin/ https://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin/ https://el34world.com/Forum/index.php https://el34world.com/Forum/index.php (A simple machines forum, this guy has been here forever, and he wrote his entire online shop himself) https://www.civicx.com https://www.civicx.com There are a LOT of niche forums out there that are not FB/Discord, and keeping track of them is a pain. I do wish newsgroups were still a thing for hobbies.
flyinghamster 3y ago
Another thing we lost, that we're just rediscovering with the kneecapping of Reddit and Twitter, is that Usenet was decentralized by design. Feed goes down or has problems? Get it from somewhere else. It was very much not perfect, though. Spam, hoaxes, and general crap abounded, and moderation was all-or-nothing and iffy at best. Hopefully, the ActivityPub world can avoid some of Usenet's mistakes and get us out of the single-point-of-failure model.
intothemild 3y ago
I don't think he's really using it now either. He has a reply to that post where he says that "some folks say that [there's piracy] alive in Usenet" but says he doesn't know if that's true. It's very true and the reason why he can't find anything textual on Usenet... Usenet is now filesharing primarily.
jll29 3y ago
I feel the same. Why can we not reactivate things? For once, I'm going to hire someone to install me a local USENET set of groups for my research team, using e.g.: local.news local.research local.research.conferences local.research.papers local.research.ideas local.research.conferences local.research.experiments local.research.datasets local.research.tools local.systems local.social local.teaching local.admin (I find NNTP servers needlessly hard to install. On the client side, there are many readers still embedded in Web browsers, but I prefer Emacs GNUS.)
andsoitis 3y ago
> 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. For a while, we had gopher, nntp, telnet, ftp, etc. but http/web ultimately provided a more general platform on which you could construct a wide variety of applications without needing to switch clients, removing friction and creating bridges.
- bluGill 3y ago
  While you can construct a wide variety of applications in html (+javascript and css), you cannot do as well as a custom application for the task. Web is a great fallback for things you don't do often, but native applications are better for things you do all the time. Which is one reason everyone wants you to install their app on your phone (though most of them are not writing good apps either)
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"I have a nagging feeling that we've dumbed things down terribly." What was Google's end game in acquiring DejaNews. Make way for "Google Groups". It's baffling. The comp.unix.* groups became less accessible for so many years, and perhaps inaccessible in some cases. Fixing accessibility problems was obviously low priority. Whatever their motives, Google indeed dumbed things down terribly.
jwells89 3y ago
On the topic of usability, I wonder if perhaps it's a matter of familiarity. I missed the heyday of Usenet by several years and instead landed right in the middle of the phpBB/InvisionBB/vBulletin era, but also made heavy use of RSS/Atom and was curious about other protocols, and so at one point played around with Usenet by way of the Panic client Unison[0]. It might've just been the client (though that'd be surprising, given Panic's knack for UI design) but I didn't find it any more intuitive than web forums. The ability to search numerous groups at once was nice though. That's not to say that web forums were or are good however. They're a step above something like Discord at least because they're open, but forum search is notoriously bad and I've never come across forum software where navigation isn't somewhat clunky. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(Usenet_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(Usenet_client)
- jwr 3y ago
  No, it is a matter of functionality. Web-based forums are objectively worse. The only thing they have working for them is that you can upload/include images. Otherwise, everything is terrible, beginning with their inability to hide stuff that you've already read. You have to wade in a sea of content every time you visit every forum. Add to this the terrible usability (for example, you only see several posts in a thread, and then you have to find the tiny tiny numbers at the bottom to go to the next "page" of posts), we've really taken a huge step back.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    So the majority of internet users cared more about posting and viewing images then every other downside combined?
nkozyra 3y ago
> The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995 Around this time a lot of them fell apart but niche ones (art, music, internet culture) were still alive and generally unspammy.
xorcist 3y ago
> The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, Well, there was a lot of fun in the chaos too. Stuff like alt.pave.the.earth had a culture around it. There was serious stuff too, like alt.save.the.earth. Also things like alt.os.linux (later renamed to comp.os.linux)
F-W-M 3y ago
forum.dlang.org is NNTP with e-mail and forum interface.

by jwr 3y ago

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.
  - zoky 3y ago
    Bro be acting like the motivation for getting the T1 installed in the first place wasn’t for porn… Remember what the Internet is for, after all.
    - boffinAudio 3y ago
      The T1 was for the customers. The 128k Ricochet modems were for me. ;)
taotau 3y ago
Coincidentally, i bought myself a Synology NAS this weekend with the honest intention of using it mainly as a backup device, but while browsing the built in apps, i noticed a lot of the media download and streaming apps mentioned BT and NZB... took me a couple of seconds to realize what NZB referred to, but Im not really surprised that NZB has become an active protocol again, given how many consumer services make you jump through hoops to use BT. I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.
- tapland 3y ago
  I get NZB but BT?
  - dspillett 3y ago
    BitTorrent I assume.
  - nick__m 3y ago
    in context it appears to mean BitTorrent
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  > I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups. There was a very nice, easy-to-use NNTP server that was intended for small sites with few users, called leafnode. It is in a mature but still-maintained state. https://www.leafnode.org/status.shtml https://www.leafnode.org/status.shtml I ran it on a laptop so I could slurp up my newsgroups and read them on the train with tin.
- throw0101b 3y ago
  > I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. Another thing that was sometimes done for BBSes was setting yourself up as a 'point node': > As the number of messages in Echomail grew over time, it became very difficult for users to keep up with the volume while logged into their local BBS. Points were introduced to address this, allowing technically-savvy users to receive the already compressed and batched Echomail (and Netmail) and read it locally on their own machines.[23] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points This was obviated a bit with the creation of offline news readers (e.g., BlueWave): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) The equivalent to QWK for Usenet were SOUP files: * https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Format_(SOUP)_Version_1.2 https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Fo... * http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/
quaddo 3y ago
I remember when the news came out that AOL was going to connect/gateway to the internet at large. There was a concerned expectation that there would be a distinct drop in the quality of USENET posts. They did not disappoint.
- prometheus76 3y ago
  It's called Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Johnythree 3y ago
> 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. So much this. So many brilliant forums began to die as they were flooded with arrogant and foul-mouthed 13 year olds who thought it great fun to flame everybody. Gradually each of the ancient users who had contributed so much eventually logged out, never to reappear. That and the new breed of Moderators who actively encouraged the trolls based on "any engagement is good".

darau1 3y ago

I still stubbornly hope that one of these silicone valley boys will "invent" USENET, and package it up nicely for the masses. That'd be cool.

throwaway847t 3y ago
Several boards use open source software, so in theory one could develop a "bridge" to Mastodon, Slack, Discord or something similar.
dsr_ 3y ago
https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed README: DFeed is: an NNTP client a mailing list archive a forum-like web interface an ATOM aggregator an IRC bot
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  They should add in Matrix, Mastodon, and Lemmy support for good measure :P
- mavhc 3y ago
  That seems to turn usenet into a forum
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    It's a multilegged bridge: any of the two-way methods are views and updates into the same dataset.
- jdporter 3y ago
  looks cool, but D specific. how easy would it be to generalize this?
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    It's written in D, and it's used to host the D forums, but it's open source, so you can run your own and pick the topics you like.

throwaway847t 3y ago

> and I have to go around and check them all for new posts Some boards support RSS/Atom, and it will help finding new posts. It is not as good as the old usenet readers, but at least you save some time.

donio 3y ago

Some comp.* groups get reasonable traffic even today although naturally it's mostly the same regulars. And I know of at least a couple of alt.* and rec.* groups that are worth checking on occasion. And there are some others that are kept alive through google groups traffic. And then there is GMANE.

dwheeler 3y ago
The comp.* hierarchy seems the most likely to have activity. It appears to me that comp.lang.ada has current discussions: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada

the_af 3y ago

> So now we have to live with those "forums" Which forums do you mean? Every community I was part of has moved to facebook groups, Reddit or Discord. PhpBB has gone the way of the dodo (regrettably, since those were the "good old days" for me, since I never used usenet).

SirMaster 3y ago
Well it’s a lot of XenForo now. But I go on AVSForums a lot and Linus tech tips forum and [H]ardforum, etc.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
There are many forums for specific communities: specific car brands, sometimes even specific car models, watches, keyboards even (!), etc. I'm on forums like these and they're doing totally fine. And if anything with the recent Reddit SNAFU the last thing users there want is for some central authority in SV to decide what they're allowed to talk about.
- the_af 3y ago
  Ah, interesting. To be clear, I also meant for specific communities: like for specific hobbies or tabletop games, or niche interests. They've all abandoned forums and, regrettably, moved on to Facebook or Discord. I'll never understand why they choose Discord, a closed chat platform, for forum type discussions. At this point I feel like Quixote tilting at the wind mills.
  - Ringz 3y ago
    I don't understand that either. Discord feels like a hamster wheel connected to a turbocharger.
  - readingnews 3y ago
    I am not so sure they all went FB/Discord, some I use(d) for example: https://www.watchuseek.com/ https://www.watchuseek.com/ https://www.rolexforums.com/ https://www.rolexforums.com/ https://www.audioasylum.com/ https://www.audioasylum.com/ https://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin/ https://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin/ https://el34world.com/Forum/index.php https://el34world.com/Forum/index.php (A simple machines forum, this guy has been here forever, and he wrote his entire online shop himself) https://www.civicx.com https://www.civicx.com There are a LOT of niche forums out there that are not FB/Discord, and keeping track of them is a pain. I do wish newsgroups were still a thing for hobbies.

flyinghamster 3y ago

Another thing we lost, that we're just rediscovering with the kneecapping of Reddit and Twitter, is that Usenet was decentralized by design. Feed goes down or has problems? Get it from somewhere else. It was very much not perfect, though. Spam, hoaxes, and general crap abounded, and moderation was all-or-nothing and iffy at best. Hopefully, the ActivityPub world can avoid some of Usenet's mistakes and get us out of the single-point-of-failure model.

intothemild 3y ago

I don't think he's really using it now either. He has a reply to that post where he says that "some folks say that [there's piracy] alive in Usenet" but says he doesn't know if that's true. It's very true and the reason why he can't find anything textual on Usenet... Usenet is now filesharing primarily.

jll29 3y ago

I feel the same. Why can we not reactivate things? For once, I'm going to hire someone to install me a local USENET set of groups for my research team, using e.g.: local.news local.research local.research.conferences local.research.papers local.research.ideas local.research.conferences local.research.experiments local.research.datasets local.research.tools local.systems local.social local.teaching local.admin (I find NNTP servers needlessly hard to install. On the client side, there are many readers still embedded in Web browsers, but I prefer Emacs GNUS.)

andsoitis 3y ago

> 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. For a while, we had gopher, nntp, telnet, ftp, etc. but http/web ultimately provided a more general platform on which you could construct a wide variety of applications without needing to switch clients, removing friction and creating bridges.

bluGill 3y ago
While you can construct a wide variety of applications in html (+javascript and css), you cannot do as well as a custom application for the task. Web is a great fallback for things you don't do often, but native applications are better for things you do all the time. Which is one reason everyone wants you to install their app on your phone (though most of them are not writing good apps either)

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"I have a nagging feeling that we've dumbed things down terribly." What was Google's end game in acquiring DejaNews. Make way for "Google Groups". It's baffling. The comp.unix.* groups became less accessible for so many years, and perhaps inaccessible in some cases. Fixing accessibility problems was obviously low priority. Whatever their motives, Google indeed dumbed things down terribly.

jwells89 3y ago

On the topic of usability, I wonder if perhaps it's a matter of familiarity. I missed the heyday of Usenet by several years and instead landed right in the middle of the phpBB/InvisionBB/vBulletin era, but also made heavy use of RSS/Atom and was curious about other protocols, and so at one point played around with Usenet by way of the Panic client Unison[0]. It might've just been the client (though that'd be surprising, given Panic's knack for UI design) but I didn't find it any more intuitive than web forums. The ability to search numerous groups at once was nice though. That's not to say that web forums were or are good however. They're a step above something like Discord at least because they're open, but forum search is notoriously bad and I've never come across forum software where navigation isn't somewhat clunky. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(Usenet_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(Usenet_client)

jwr 3y ago
No, it is a matter of functionality. Web-based forums are objectively worse. The only thing they have working for them is that you can upload/include images. Otherwise, everything is terrible, beginning with their inability to hide stuff that you've already read. You have to wade in a sea of content every time you visit every forum. Add to this the terrible usability (for example, you only see several posts in a thread, and then you have to find the tiny tiny numbers at the bottom to go to the next "page" of posts), we've really taken a huge step back.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  So the majority of internet users cared more about posting and viewing images then every other downside combined?

nkozyra 3y ago

> The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995 Around this time a lot of them fell apart but niche ones (art, music, internet culture) were still alive and generally unspammy.

xorcist 3y ago

> The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, Well, there was a lot of fun in the chaos too. Stuff like alt.pave.the.earth had a culture around it. There was serious stuff too, like alt.save.the.earth. Also things like alt.os.linux (later renamed to comp.os.linux)

F-W-M 3y ago

forum.dlang.org is NNTP with e-mail and forum interface.