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The nightmare is over? I've used Usenet for years. Most serious users filter out any post originating from G2 to do away with Google posts. It's been a huge

The nightmare is over? I've used Usenet for years. Most serious users filter out any post originating from G2 to do away with Google posts. It's been a huge source of spam and annoyance. Usenet gets better as it gets smaller, honestly. Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active. Several groups in the comp* hierarchy are active. Thunderbird, claws-mail, sylpheed, tin, slrn, alpine, neomutt all handle Usenet just fine. Visit http://newsgroupreviews.com http://newsgroupreviews.com for a list of providers, some free, some paid.

dataangel 3y ago
Is there a broader tutorial for this, newsgroups mostly missed me, I don't really grok how they fit into the greater internet or how their hosting works or why you have to pay a separate provider
- pwg 3y ago
  These two wikipedia articles are a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nntp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nntp As for "why pay separate provider" -- that would be because circa 2000 most ISP's dropped offering Usenet access for their customers as part of the deal, which created a market for the paid providers. But, you don't /have/ to pay: https://greycoder.com/best-free-usenet-servers/ https://greycoder.com/best-free-usenet-servers/
- blihp 3y ago
  In the dark ages when internet access was limited and/or via dialup for most of us, there were several tools and protocols to work with what we had: email, ftp and usenet were some of the main ones. Usenet was basically a primordial set of distributed forums platform (and quasi-social network) where copies of the data were stored locally. It was how a lot of information got disseminated prior to the mid-90's when the web took off and then over.
  - Fatnino 3y ago
    Also where the (outdated) idea that "the internet never forgets anything" came from.
    - jghn 3y ago
      There was a period of time where the notion that everything would be archived was unfathomable to the average user. Sure, in theory it could be. But storage was expensive and the value of storing that stuff was low. Unfortunately, when DejaNews came out it became clear that at least one person out there recorded everything. Many an embarrassing post of mine was unearthed. When one has tens of thousands of posts and is young & stupid, that was bound to happen. Of course now all these years later I can barely find any of my posts on the internet, embarrassing or otherwise.
  - jghn 3y ago
    IMO an analogy to modern times would be a federated Reddit. I'd liken it to Lemmy but don't have enough experience with it to be sure it doesn't ruin my analogy in some way :)
    - immibis 3y ago
      It's probably better, on a technical level, than any of the fediverse stuff. I understand that Usenet works as a gossip protocol with nodes sharing everything they have (and haven't filtered) while Fediverse usually relies on directly contacting the origin server over IP. The integration between different instances on Mastodon and Lemmy is nothing like Usenet. The integration in the Fediverse is limited to following users, liking posts and replying to posts on other servers, using your federated identity on your server.
      - immibis 3y ago
        Update: I actually used Usenet a bit yesterday, mostly reading administrators explaining how the system works, and deleting spam. It's a cool system, I guess. It should be possible to have other things built on top of the protocol. The protocol is a store-and-forward broadcast system, and is mostly agnostic to what goes in the packets, although if you want to add a group, each server operator has to agree to carry it, and they can have server-specific restrictions on things like message sizes, dropping messages outside the limits, so it isn't reliable. If you wanted to make a Usenet group simulating Reddit, you could easily pass votes through the system. Clients would have to interpret them, so you'd have to write your own client. It's tolerant of spam as long as it isn't extremely excessive. There was talk of de-peering Google due to a large volume of spam, before Google made the decision itself, but most groups are about half spam besides that. The low volume of actual users contributes to this. There's a group, I think news.admin.peering, for requesting your own server to be connected to the network. I see many successful requests from various people in the group's history. The network is fully decentralized, so being connected is reliant on at least one other person being willing to connect to you.
- nvy 3y ago
  >I don't really grok how they fit into the greater internet or how their hosting works or why you have to pay a separate provider In much the same way that you need a specialized email client to use IMAP/SMTP, you need a specialized client that speaks NNTP to access usenet. The providers are heterogeneous but usually are basically beefy servers connected to fat pipes to handle the massive volume of traffic, which is why you typically need to pay for access.
- ksherlock 3y ago
  One way to think usenet/newsgroups is as a set of distributed peer-to-peer mailing lists. You post a message to your (NNTP) server. Your server connects to other peer NNTP servers to transfer messages back and forth, so eventually your message will propagate throughout the usenet network. (40 years ago peering was through UUCP, etc, and done at night when phone calls were cheaper or only to other local numbers so it might take a week, now it doesn't take that long. See also, bang paths).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Uptrenda 3y ago
You think it's worth getting into Usenet for new people?
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  Its worth it in the same way that HAM radio is / is not worth it. You do it as a sort of lifestyle choice.
  - j4nek 3y ago
    can you explain this a bit deeper?
    - immibis 3y ago
      Facebook and Reddit are better ways to talk to people, but you're already here on Hacker News so it's apparent they don't suit your tastes. If you're concerned about Internet centralization, learning other systems that may be less centralized is great, but you know you won't be using it to talk to people you'd talk to on Facebook. And if you're concerned about the Internet itself, you learn ham radio.
- Kye 3y ago
  Gopher is the next big thing.
  - ggm 3y ago
    I literally write a briefing paper advising my university to clamp down on the nascent web and continue with gopher which was much more systematic and organized. Clearly they ignored me as they should.
    - immibis 3y ago
      You're not wrong - the web is very disorganized. This makes it more valuable to shareholders, as they can design sites to present us with whatever extracts optimal value at the present moment. That's how Google gets to interpose itself between us and what we're looking for, and redirect us to SEO spam pages.
bsder 3y ago
Is there a reason why you can't run your own Usenet server nowadays? In the old days, the issues were that bandwidth and disk were expensive. That's no longer true. Is there a techncial reason we can't have individuals running NNTP nodes?
- wolverine876 3y ago
  If Usenet's requirements haven't increased in a 2-3 decades, and in its moribund state I expect they haven't, then it should be trivial to run Usenet servers on almost any device, at least in terms of resources.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  Guess it's hard to get others sync with you?
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    The principle use-case for Usenet has always been small, controlled-access networks. That's what ARPANET and the early Internet were, where "small" meant < 1 million active participants and "controlled access" meant meeting the requirement of belonging to one of a limited number of academic institutions, tech companies, government agencies, or select military units. Total Usenet participation in April 1988 were 140,000 readers, by Eric Reid's DEC surveys, as cited in John S. Quarterman's The Matrix (1990): <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/page/248/mode/2up?q=Eric+Reid https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/page/24...> Spinning up an NNTP group for internal company communications, for a family group, or for a (sufficently tech-savvy) organisation or hobby group would be a viable option. My experience is that peak group experience tends to occur with somewhere between about 5 and maybe 1,000 participants on the high end, and that's being generous. In practice, 5--50 is probably a better sweet spot. The technology isn't the stumbling point nearly so much as convincing people to use the service. In some industries, privacy and disclosure rules may preempt usage (e.g., healthcare, finance). And the fact that Usenet has no intrinsic authentication or attestation of identity (though these can be provided by additional mechanisms such as PGP/GPG signatures) means that publicly accessible newsgroups are likely to be nonviable given malicious actors. What's underappreciated about much of the early Internet / online world is how small most of the "large" (as in influential) groups or movements were. Usenet, the WELL, Slashdot, and early blogging had core groups of perhaps a few hundred to a few thousand people, possibly fewer. Yes, there were additional participants in many cases, but in terms of how concentrated the bulk of activity was, small.
skrause 3y ago
> Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active. misc.news.internet.discuss and sci.misc are bascially a single person posting links without any discussion.

dataangel 3y ago

Is there a broader tutorial for this, newsgroups mostly missed me, I don't really grok how they fit into the greater internet or how their hosting works or why you have to pay a separate provider

pwg 3y ago
These two wikipedia articles are a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nntp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nntp As for "why pay separate provider" -- that would be because circa 2000 most ISP's dropped offering Usenet access for their customers as part of the deal, which created a market for the paid providers. But, you don't /have/ to pay: https://greycoder.com/best-free-usenet-servers/ https://greycoder.com/best-free-usenet-servers/
blihp 3y ago
In the dark ages when internet access was limited and/or via dialup for most of us, there were several tools and protocols to work with what we had: email, ftp and usenet were some of the main ones. Usenet was basically a primordial set of distributed forums platform (and quasi-social network) where copies of the data were stored locally. It was how a lot of information got disseminated prior to the mid-90's when the web took off and then over.
- Fatnino 3y ago
  Also where the (outdated) idea that "the internet never forgets anything" came from.
  - jghn 3y ago
    There was a period of time where the notion that everything would be archived was unfathomable to the average user. Sure, in theory it could be. But storage was expensive and the value of storing that stuff was low. Unfortunately, when DejaNews came out it became clear that at least one person out there recorded everything. Many an embarrassing post of mine was unearthed. When one has tens of thousands of posts and is young & stupid, that was bound to happen. Of course now all these years later I can barely find any of my posts on the internet, embarrassing or otherwise.
- jghn 3y ago
  IMO an analogy to modern times would be a federated Reddit. I'd liken it to Lemmy but don't have enough experience with it to be sure it doesn't ruin my analogy in some way :)
  - immibis 3y ago
    It's probably better, on a technical level, than any of the fediverse stuff. I understand that Usenet works as a gossip protocol with nodes sharing everything they have (and haven't filtered) while Fediverse usually relies on directly contacting the origin server over IP. The integration between different instances on Mastodon and Lemmy is nothing like Usenet. The integration in the Fediverse is limited to following users, liking posts and replying to posts on other servers, using your federated identity on your server.
    - immibis 3y ago
      Update: I actually used Usenet a bit yesterday, mostly reading administrators explaining how the system works, and deleting spam. It's a cool system, I guess. It should be possible to have other things built on top of the protocol. The protocol is a store-and-forward broadcast system, and is mostly agnostic to what goes in the packets, although if you want to add a group, each server operator has to agree to carry it, and they can have server-specific restrictions on things like message sizes, dropping messages outside the limits, so it isn't reliable. If you wanted to make a Usenet group simulating Reddit, you could easily pass votes through the system. Clients would have to interpret them, so you'd have to write your own client. It's tolerant of spam as long as it isn't extremely excessive. There was talk of de-peering Google due to a large volume of spam, before Google made the decision itself, but most groups are about half spam besides that. The low volume of actual users contributes to this. There's a group, I think news.admin.peering, for requesting your own server to be connected to the network. I see many successful requests from various people in the group's history. The network is fully decentralized, so being connected is reliant on at least one other person being willing to connect to you.
nvy 3y ago
>I don't really grok how they fit into the greater internet or how their hosting works or why you have to pay a separate provider In much the same way that you need a specialized email client to use IMAP/SMTP, you need a specialized client that speaks NNTP to access usenet. The providers are heterogeneous but usually are basically beefy servers connected to fat pipes to handle the massive volume of traffic, which is why you typically need to pay for access.
ksherlock 3y ago
One way to think usenet/newsgroups is as a set of distributed peer-to-peer mailing lists. You post a message to your (NNTP) server. Your server connects to other peer NNTP servers to transfer messages back and forth, so eventually your message will propagate throughout the usenet network. (40 years ago peering was through UUCP, etc, and done at night when phone calls were cheaper or only to other local numbers so it might take a week, now it doesn't take that long. See also, bang paths).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Uptrenda 3y ago

You think it's worth getting into Usenet for new people?

idiotsecant 3y ago
Its worth it in the same way that HAM radio is / is not worth it. You do it as a sort of lifestyle choice.
- j4nek 3y ago
  can you explain this a bit deeper?
  - immibis 3y ago
    Facebook and Reddit are better ways to talk to people, but you're already here on Hacker News so it's apparent they don't suit your tastes. If you're concerned about Internet centralization, learning other systems that may be less centralized is great, but you know you won't be using it to talk to people you'd talk to on Facebook. And if you're concerned about the Internet itself, you learn ham radio.
Kye 3y ago
Gopher is the next big thing.
- ggm 3y ago
  I literally write a briefing paper advising my university to clamp down on the nascent web and continue with gopher which was much more systematic and organized. Clearly they ignored me as they should.
  - immibis 3y ago
    You're not wrong - the web is very disorganized. This makes it more valuable to shareholders, as they can design sites to present us with whatever extracts optimal value at the present moment. That's how Google gets to interpose itself between us and what we're looking for, and redirect us to SEO spam pages.

bsder 3y ago

Is there a reason why you can't run your own Usenet server nowadays? In the old days, the issues were that bandwidth and disk were expensive. That's no longer true. Is there a techncial reason we can't have individuals running NNTP nodes?

wolverine876 3y ago
If Usenet's requirements haven't increased in a 2-3 decades, and in its moribund state I expect they haven't, then it should be trivial to run Usenet servers on almost any device, at least in terms of resources.
j16sdiz 3y ago
Guess it's hard to get others sync with you?
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  The principle use-case for Usenet has always been small, controlled-access networks. That's what ARPANET and the early Internet were, where "small" meant < 1 million active participants and "controlled access" meant meeting the requirement of belonging to one of a limited number of academic institutions, tech companies, government agencies, or select military units. Total Usenet participation in April 1988 were 140,000 readers, by Eric Reid's DEC surveys, as cited in John S. Quarterman's The Matrix (1990): <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/page/248/mode/2up?q=Eric+Reid https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/page/24...> Spinning up an NNTP group for internal company communications, for a family group, or for a (sufficently tech-savvy) organisation or hobby group would be a viable option. My experience is that peak group experience tends to occur with somewhere between about 5 and maybe 1,000 participants on the high end, and that's being generous. In practice, 5--50 is probably a better sweet spot. The technology isn't the stumbling point nearly so much as convincing people to use the service. In some industries, privacy and disclosure rules may preempt usage (e.g., healthcare, finance). And the fact that Usenet has no intrinsic authentication or attestation of identity (though these can be provided by additional mechanisms such as PGP/GPG signatures) means that publicly accessible newsgroups are likely to be nonviable given malicious actors. What's underappreciated about much of the early Internet / online world is how small most of the "large" (as in influential) groups or movements were. Usenet, the WELL, Slashdot, and early blogging had core groups of perhaps a few hundred to a few thousand people, possibly fewer. Yes, there were additional participants in many cases, but in terms of how concentrated the bulk of activity was, small.

skrause 3y ago

> Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active. misc.news.internet.discuss and sci.misc are bascially a single person posting links without any discussion.