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The older I get the more I feel like Usenet was/is a lost opportunity. With a few improvements it could have taken the place of Facebook (not the original conne

The older I get the more I feel like Usenet was/is a lost opportunity. With a few improvements it could have taken the place of Facebook (not the original connecting with friends version Facebook) and Reddit. It could have been a great option for local business promotion and news distribution, and the same segmentation into groups would map almost perfectly into subreddits. It is decentralized, multiple clients where available and you could segment into as narrow topics as you'd like.

kseistrup 2y ago
@asjo over at koldfront.dk is still using NNTP for all sorts of things (RSS aggregator, blog engine, ActivityPub server): https://koldfront.dk/just_call_me_mr_nntp_1871 https://koldfront.dk/just_call_me_mr_nntp_1871 Indeed, it was a lost opportunity. The protocol os easy to understand, and it plays well with decentralization as you say, and with self hosting. With Python 3.12 out, its nntplib module is scheduled for deletion/removal in v3.13. What a pity. The NNTP protocol surely deserves a revival.
ktosobcy 2y ago
This! I still hands on a couple of groups though the traffic there is getting thinner with each day... It was simple. I wasn't forced with account (though would be nice/useful nowadays I guess with all the impersonation and whatnot), threading was awesome. Scoring+plonk was even more amazing. There was a problem with syncing what was read and not but that could be easily improved now... I think I mostly miss scoring - it was such an amazing tool to manage/filter out desired content...
- mmcgaha 2y ago
  I hope the last post is in alt.obituaries for usenet itself. Unfortunately it will probably be a post about a free ebook download cross posted to half of usenet.
immibis 2y ago
There was some minor discussion in this direction in the thread about email 2.0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40392709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40392709 Bad service drives out good service just like bad money, for some reason. Centralized beats decentralized because convenience. The convenience is what they're paying to entice you to come into their home and let them eat your brains, and every single person falls for it, probably including you and me. Classic Usenet is still around. If you have an email address, you can get an account on Eternal September. There aren't that many users. You can be one of them.
- mr_mitm 2y ago
  It's not just convenience. Having a centralized authority - with all its downsides - comes with some crucial advantages. They can: * provide identities * moderate content * vouch for integrity * enforce a consistent set of features The same problems haunt email. It's also why Marlinspike was always against federating Signal. Decentralization comes with some hard problems.
  - bithead 2y ago
    True enough but we know what scientology believes because of USENET (alt.religion.scientology). The church of scientology literally ran out of lawyers for DMCA takedowns, which don't work on USENET because it is structured like the internet. NNTP needed things to be sure but the above issues have technical solutions that seemed out of reach not because they were too complex to solve, but is seemed as if society itself wanted multimedia web pages like a coke addict. Also things like digital identity seemed to flag as innovation for such things stalled out around the time HTTP became rising. I remember moving data between mainframes from different vendors and what was once a set of problems that seemed intractable suddenly fell as TCP/UDP/IP took off with a suite of solutions that worked so well together. USENet was a better place to get good information compared to web pages at that time in parts due to bad web site designs and DMCA takedowns, neither of which was an issue for NNTP. I like Reddit because (at least old.reddit) is similar to USENet in how it is structured. Had NNTP adopted HTML and Netscape written a browser for news groups using HTML, the so-called 'world wide web' and it's anachronistic client-server model might not have effectively displaced NNTP.
mr_mitm 2y ago
Usenet has a few hard problems, no? Mostly related to moderation. You want to be able to edit or delete content, either your own, or, if you are a moderator, other content which turned out to be illegal later (which already implies content moderation before allowing content to be published). Spam is another big problem. To avoid impersonation, you'd have to sign everything, which I guess is possible, but experience shows crypto done properly is a huge pain. We already see how unsatisfactory this works with email. Plus, does usenet scale as well as, say, reddit? Sometimes heated threads are more like comment streams with probably dozens of comments per second. How can these be solved with a few improvements?
- immibis 2y ago
  A parallel copy of Usenet is used for piracy, with a posting volume measured in double-digit gigabits per second. It can probably handle Reddit.
  - mr_mitm 2y ago
    That's regarding the size of the entries, not the frequency though. Many small comments in a short time frame will have a huge overhead. Also, there is a reason why binary content was first frowned upon, then became essentially a paid feature. It's expensive.
- ThinkBeat 2y ago
  Impersonation and spam are things you find on other ways of running a forum. On Usenet you can easily stop following a group or person.
  - mr_mitm 2y ago
    Isn't spoofing an email sender address much easier than taking over an account on a web-based forum? I think forums are very robust against that, while email and usenet are not.
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    Plonk
abc123abc123 2y ago
Why? It works great. Since google dropped usenet access through the web, spam is down, discussions are great, and if there is no discussion start one. I'm enjoying usenet immensely!
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  How do you get set up and started? I could trawl through a few blogs of course, but I'd be interested to hear what you do yourself for a current snapshot of usage. I think it sounds interesting myself, and have read some quite convincing propagandastic material from Harley Hahn about it working through some Unix book a little while back.
  - ptero 2y ago
    eternal-september.org is a good, free option. But the frequency of usenet posting (at least on groups that I still look at) is pretty low...
    - sourcepluck 2y ago
      Thanks, will have a look there.
actionfromafar 2y ago
Back in 1998 my ISP dropped NNTP because it was pretty expensive to run, it required large, fast SCSI disks and ate quite a bit of bandwidth, constantly. At the same time rather few customers used it, so it was an easy decision for them to just decommission that server.
- immibis 2y ago
  That must have been before the high-bandwidth binary side decoupled from the forum side.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Yes but no: my ISP never carried alt.binaries
    - immibis 2y ago
      Current text volume is on the order of a few gigabytes per day, including spam.
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        Way back then my ISP had a T1 shared among hundreds of customers. :-D
- speckx 2y ago
  I recall my ISP doing the same eventually around the same time. At first, they stopped carrying binary groups and, later, all of Usenet.
ChicagoDave 2y ago
There was horrible arrogant gatekeeping for new feeds, especially if you asked for a moderated feed. Those gatekeepers never saw the train coming (web) and then it was too late.
- treyd 2y ago
  That's more of a social problem than a technical one. Although iterating on the technology ultimately circumvented it, it could have been addressed without completely throwing away usenet.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    Usenet was never thrown away. It's still there if you want it, but you'll have to pay to use it. https://www.usenet.com/ https://www.usenet.com/ What changed was the user profile. Late 80s/early 90s internet was used almost exclusively by academics and engineers. Mid-90s onwards it was open to everyone, and Usenet access was a free feature of most dial-up accounts. Usenet was ground zero for that change, because university and corporate admins had to deal with a lot of new groups - including those devoted to binaries, and especially porn. There was a lot of gatekeeping, but the useful groups either migrated or disappeared under spam, and the conversations moved elsewhere. HN is probably the closest thing to the original culture, but HN's single page design means you don't get the intense focus and conversational momentum of Usenet's professional groups.

kseistrup 2y ago

@asjo over at koldfront.dk is still using NNTP for all sorts of things (RSS aggregator, blog engine, ActivityPub server): https://koldfront.dk/just_call_me_mr_nntp_1871 https://koldfront.dk/just_call_me_mr_nntp_1871 Indeed, it was a lost opportunity. The protocol os easy to understand, and it plays well with decentralization as you say, and with self hosting. With Python 3.12 out, its nntplib module is scheduled for deletion/removal in v3.13. What a pity. The NNTP protocol surely deserves a revival.

ktosobcy 2y ago

This! I still hands on a couple of groups though the traffic there is getting thinner with each day... It was simple. I wasn't forced with account (though would be nice/useful nowadays I guess with all the impersonation and whatnot), threading was awesome. Scoring+plonk was even more amazing. There was a problem with syncing what was read and not but that could be easily improved now... I think I mostly miss scoring - it was such an amazing tool to manage/filter out desired content...

mmcgaha 2y ago
I hope the last post is in alt.obituaries for usenet itself. Unfortunately it will probably be a post about a free ebook download cross posted to half of usenet.

immibis 2y ago

There was some minor discussion in this direction in the thread about email 2.0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40392709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40392709 Bad service drives out good service just like bad money, for some reason. Centralized beats decentralized because convenience. The convenience is what they're paying to entice you to come into their home and let them eat your brains, and every single person falls for it, probably including you and me. Classic Usenet is still around. If you have an email address, you can get an account on Eternal September. There aren't that many users. You can be one of them.

mr_mitm 2y ago
It's not just convenience. Having a centralized authority - with all its downsides - comes with some crucial advantages. They can: * provide identities * moderate content * vouch for integrity * enforce a consistent set of features The same problems haunt email. It's also why Marlinspike was always against federating Signal. Decentralization comes with some hard problems.
- bithead 2y ago
  True enough but we know what scientology believes because of USENET (alt.religion.scientology). The church of scientology literally ran out of lawyers for DMCA takedowns, which don't work on USENET because it is structured like the internet. NNTP needed things to be sure but the above issues have technical solutions that seemed out of reach not because they were too complex to solve, but is seemed as if society itself wanted multimedia web pages like a coke addict. Also things like digital identity seemed to flag as innovation for such things stalled out around the time HTTP became rising. I remember moving data between mainframes from different vendors and what was once a set of problems that seemed intractable suddenly fell as TCP/UDP/IP took off with a suite of solutions that worked so well together. USENet was a better place to get good information compared to web pages at that time in parts due to bad web site designs and DMCA takedowns, neither of which was an issue for NNTP. I like Reddit because (at least old.reddit) is similar to USENet in how it is structured. Had NNTP adopted HTML and Netscape written a browser for news groups using HTML, the so-called 'world wide web' and it's anachronistic client-server model might not have effectively displaced NNTP.

mr_mitm 2y ago

Usenet has a few hard problems, no? Mostly related to moderation. You want to be able to edit or delete content, either your own, or, if you are a moderator, other content which turned out to be illegal later (which already implies content moderation before allowing content to be published). Spam is another big problem. To avoid impersonation, you'd have to sign everything, which I guess is possible, but experience shows crypto done properly is a huge pain. We already see how unsatisfactory this works with email. Plus, does usenet scale as well as, say, reddit? Sometimes heated threads are more like comment streams with probably dozens of comments per second. How can these be solved with a few improvements?

immibis 2y ago
A parallel copy of Usenet is used for piracy, with a posting volume measured in double-digit gigabits per second. It can probably handle Reddit.
- mr_mitm 2y ago
  That's regarding the size of the entries, not the frequency though. Many small comments in a short time frame will have a huge overhead. Also, there is a reason why binary content was first frowned upon, then became essentially a paid feature. It's expensive.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
Impersonation and spam are things you find on other ways of running a forum. On Usenet you can easily stop following a group or person.
- mr_mitm 2y ago
  Isn't spoofing an email sender address much easier than taking over an account on a web-based forum? I think forums are very robust against that, while email and usenet are not.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  Plonk

abc123abc123 2y ago

Why? It works great. Since google dropped usenet access through the web, spam is down, discussions are great, and if there is no discussion start one. I'm enjoying usenet immensely!

sourcepluck 2y ago
How do you get set up and started? I could trawl through a few blogs of course, but I'd be interested to hear what you do yourself for a current snapshot of usage. I think it sounds interesting myself, and have read some quite convincing propagandastic material from Harley Hahn about it working through some Unix book a little while back.
- ptero 2y ago
  eternal-september.org is a good, free option. But the frequency of usenet posting (at least on groups that I still look at) is pretty low...
  - sourcepluck 2y ago
    Thanks, will have a look there.

actionfromafar 2y ago

Back in 1998 my ISP dropped NNTP because it was pretty expensive to run, it required large, fast SCSI disks and ate quite a bit of bandwidth, constantly. At the same time rather few customers used it, so it was an easy decision for them to just decommission that server.

immibis 2y ago
That must have been before the high-bandwidth binary side decoupled from the forum side.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Yes but no: my ISP never carried alt.binaries
  - immibis 2y ago
    Current text volume is on the order of a few gigabytes per day, including spam.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      Way back then my ISP had a T1 shared among hundreds of customers. :-D
speckx 2y ago
I recall my ISP doing the same eventually around the same time. At first, they stopped carrying binary groups and, later, all of Usenet.

ChicagoDave 2y ago

There was horrible arrogant gatekeeping for new feeds, especially if you asked for a moderated feed. Those gatekeepers never saw the train coming (web) and then it was too late.

treyd 2y ago
That's more of a social problem than a technical one. Although iterating on the technology ultimately circumvented it, it could have been addressed without completely throwing away usenet.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Usenet was never thrown away. It's still there if you want it, but you'll have to pay to use it. https://www.usenet.com/ https://www.usenet.com/ What changed was the user profile. Late 80s/early 90s internet was used almost exclusively by academics and engineers. Mid-90s onwards it was open to everyone, and Usenet access was a free feature of most dial-up accounts. Usenet was ground zero for that change, because university and corporate admins had to deal with a lot of new groups - including those devoted to binaries, and especially porn. There was a lot of gatekeeping, but the useful groups either migrated or disappeared under spam, and the conversations moved elsewhere. HN is probably the closest thing to the original culture, but HN's single page design means you don't get the intense focus and conversational momentum of Usenet's professional groups.