4 ms·

Ask HN: Why is Usenet not coming back?

If we want to stay out of the hands of Big Tech and want information / discussions to be distributed and replicated, why are we going back to using Usenet?

al_borland 1y ago
My guess is people don’t want to deal with the learning curve. If it’s not a website or an app people can just start using, it ends up being a non-starter these days. The pain of big tech is not bigger than the pain of the learning curve for most people.
- cmacleod4 1y ago
  Actually there are a few web interfaces to Usenet that make it easy to jump in, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sites_and_popularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... I operate one of these myself at https://newsgrouper.org https://newsgrouper.org .
Rotundo 1y ago
Usenet worked because it started with people that valued the medium. The Netiquette was a voluntary code of conduct. It worked, as long as the influx of people was small enough that they could learn how to behave. And then the masses got onto the Internet. Lookup the term "Eternal September" [1]. The whole culture got overwhelmed by people that did not value the medium. Spam got out of hand, trolling was a most popular pastime. That killed Usenet, as normal discussion was impossible. Can Usenet be revived? Not while there is money to be made on the Internet. Any attempt to gather people online gets perverted by someone smelling money. Usenet was great until the mid-nineties. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- ivape 1y ago
  It may be time for us vampires to return to the underground.
mathiaspoint 1y ago
One of the forums I often post to frequently went down the other month for a couple weeks (everyone thought it was gone for good) so I went back to idling on IRC for a while. These things are still there, I occasionally peak at newsgroups from time to time (there are free providers for the text trees) they're just not growing. IMO a lack of growth these days is probably a good thing.
Bender 1y ago
Why is Usenet not coming back? It likely will. Give it some time for more internet screws to be tightened around the world. Once people see the screws had Loctite applied they will find more alternatives and revive older transports protocols. Usenet is still the vastly superior medium for automatically sharing massive amounts of multimedia content if one filters on pre-shared subjects preshared secrets, GPG signed messages. The spam can be entirely and automagically ignored. My personal preference will always be anonymous Chroot SFTP and people using the LFTP client with the mirror subsystem and SFTP to split up batch jobs and individual files into multiple TCP streams. It works like rsync but much better as long as there are not massive numbers of nested sub-directories. LFTP+SFTP+mirror can easily max out any fiber connection but can also be rate limited with very granular controls. It's great for small circles of friends being significantly more secure and private. It's also super easy to automate uploads and downloads via cron. For even greater anonymity friends can build their own Tinc VPN mesh open source in a multi-star configuration so people do not see each others IP addresses. Internet bots don't even know what to do with anonymous chroot sftp and that's assuming I leave it on the default port.
- Fabeltjeskrant 1y ago
  Yeah, but that’s not what I was referring to. I know Usenet is nowadays mainly used for sharing “massive amounts of multimedia content”, but I was referring to the text-based content. Discussions, stories, proposals. Yes, I have seen all that on Usenet. I am that old. I’m not being nostalgic here, but when I think of the pre-spam Usenet, it might be what we need again. Maybe with a more modern UI? Lemmy, maybe? A federated forum system like Reddit, 4chan? Does that exist at all? A web UI which shows threads from all kinds of servers all together in a phpBB-like interface?
  - cmacleod4 1y ago
    Web UIs exist with a variety of interface styles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sites_and_popularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . The now-defunct novaBBS was probably the closest to phpBB in style, but the new go-pugleaf is aiming in a similar direction.
tacostakohashi 1y ago
Because it became full of spam, obscene and illegal material. For all their faults, big tech do mostly moderate their sites to the extent you won't find illegal things there.
- lordkrandel 1y ago
  Better than 24h ads and mind manipulation. I can address scam and spams better than consumerism burning my soul.
  - Someone 1y ago
    Are you sure? The real picture is significantly worse than what you see in your inbox. About half of all email messages are spam nowadays (https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffic-share-annual/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffi...), and that’s less than ten years ago.
    - lordkrandel 1y ago
      Yeah, and I use email for work everyday, and it's used as the main way of authentication in the free web... anyway! I guess it will change now with this "age verification" thing that will put a barcode and a chain on your neck and bring you to the Trumpywood Teslapark dystopia they're sorta building.
- cmacleod4 1y ago
  There's a lot less spam since Google Groups disconnected last year. Good text-based providers like https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ also filter out spam and don't carry the binary groups where porn and piracy is found.
mikewarot 1y ago
If you wanted something equivalent to usenet to come back, you'd have to solve the moderation problem across a number of incompatible governance frameworks, which can not be done in a single hierarchy, no matter how hard you try. Having multiple moderators of content, and multiple dimensions of moderation (think tags with attached scalar multipliers) could possibly work. Each host of the feed could then just not store anything that fails to pass as legal in their jurisdiction, or fails to meet their moderation policies. Regardless of its arrangement, any large cooperative collection of stuff, albeit in a feed like usenet, or forums, or a files store, multidimensional ranking/moderating/reputation management is the way to go, IMHO.
- deleted 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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dv_dt 1y ago
I wonder if it is sort of back in the form fediverse/activity pub. It's interesting to me that fedi admins often use relay feeds to help in kick starting nodes. Fedi has a more distributed interaction model then usenet but I wonder if more fedi feeds will end up serving a similar purpose as usenet aggregations. I have been a user of both and an admin of neither so these may be incorrect observations.

If we want to stay out of the hands of Big Tech and want information / discussions to be distributed and replicated, why are we going back to using Usenet?

al_borland 1y ago

My guess is people don’t want to deal with the learning curve. If it’s not a website or an app people can just start using, it ends up being a non-starter these days. The pain of big tech is not bigger than the pain of the learning curve for most people.

cmacleod4 1y ago
Actually there are a few web interfaces to Usenet that make it easy to jump in, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sites_and_popularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... I operate one of these myself at https://newsgrouper.org https://newsgrouper.org .

Rotundo 1y ago

Usenet worked because it started with people that valued the medium. The Netiquette was a voluntary code of conduct. It worked, as long as the influx of people was small enough that they could learn how to behave. And then the masses got onto the Internet. Lookup the term "Eternal September" [1]. The whole culture got overwhelmed by people that did not value the medium. Spam got out of hand, trolling was a most popular pastime. That killed Usenet, as normal discussion was impossible. Can Usenet be revived? Not while there is money to be made on the Internet. Any attempt to gather people online gets perverted by someone smelling money. Usenet was great until the mid-nineties. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

ivape 1y ago
It may be time for us vampires to return to the underground.

mathiaspoint 1y ago

One of the forums I often post to frequently went down the other month for a couple weeks (everyone thought it was gone for good) so I went back to idling on IRC for a while. These things are still there, I occasionally peak at newsgroups from time to time (there are free providers for the text trees) they're just not growing. IMO a lack of growth these days is probably a good thing.

Bender 1y ago

Why is Usenet not coming back? It likely will. Give it some time for more internet screws to be tightened around the world. Once people see the screws had Loctite applied they will find more alternatives and revive older transports protocols. Usenet is still the vastly superior medium for automatically sharing massive amounts of multimedia content if one filters on pre-shared subjects preshared secrets, GPG signed messages. The spam can be entirely and automagically ignored. My personal preference will always be anonymous Chroot SFTP and people using the LFTP client with the mirror subsystem and SFTP to split up batch jobs and individual files into multiple TCP streams. It works like rsync but much better as long as there are not massive numbers of nested sub-directories. LFTP+SFTP+mirror can easily max out any fiber connection but can also be rate limited with very granular controls. It's great for small circles of friends being significantly more secure and private. It's also super easy to automate uploads and downloads via cron. For even greater anonymity friends can build their own Tinc VPN mesh open source in a multi-star configuration so people do not see each others IP addresses. Internet bots don't even know what to do with anonymous chroot sftp and that's assuming I leave it on the default port.

Fabeltjeskrant 1y ago
Yeah, but that’s not what I was referring to. I know Usenet is nowadays mainly used for sharing “massive amounts of multimedia content”, but I was referring to the text-based content. Discussions, stories, proposals. Yes, I have seen all that on Usenet. I am that old. I’m not being nostalgic here, but when I think of the pre-spam Usenet, it might be what we need again. Maybe with a more modern UI? Lemmy, maybe? A federated forum system like Reddit, 4chan? Does that exist at all? A web UI which shows threads from all kinds of servers all together in a phpBB-like interface?
- cmacleod4 1y ago
  Web UIs exist with a variety of interface styles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sites_and_popularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . The now-defunct novaBBS was probably the closest to phpBB in style, but the new go-pugleaf is aiming in a similar direction.

tacostakohashi 1y ago

Because it became full of spam, obscene and illegal material. For all their faults, big tech do mostly moderate their sites to the extent you won't find illegal things there.

lordkrandel 1y ago
Better than 24h ads and mind manipulation. I can address scam and spams better than consumerism burning my soul.
- Someone 1y ago
  Are you sure? The real picture is significantly worse than what you see in your inbox. About half of all email messages are spam nowadays (https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffic-share-annual/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffi...), and that’s less than ten years ago.
  - lordkrandel 1y ago
    Yeah, and I use email for work everyday, and it's used as the main way of authentication in the free web... anyway! I guess it will change now with this "age verification" thing that will put a barcode and a chain on your neck and bring you to the Trumpywood Teslapark dystopia they're sorta building.
cmacleod4 1y ago
There's a lot less spam since Google Groups disconnected last year. Good text-based providers like https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ also filter out spam and don't carry the binary groups where porn and piracy is found.

mikewarot 1y ago

If you wanted something equivalent to usenet to come back, you'd have to solve the moderation problem across a number of incompatible governance frameworks, which can not be done in a single hierarchy, no matter how hard you try. Having multiple moderators of content, and multiple dimensions of moderation (think tags with attached scalar multipliers) could possibly work. Each host of the feed could then just not store anything that fails to pass as legal in their jurisdiction, or fails to meet their moderation policies. Regardless of its arrangement, any large cooperative collection of stuff, albeit in a feed like usenet, or forums, or a files store, multidimensional ranking/moderating/reputation management is the way to go, IMHO.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dv_dt 1y ago

I wonder if it is sort of back in the form fediverse/activity pub. It's interesting to me that fedi admins often use relay feeds to help in kick starting nodes. Fedi has a more distributed interaction model then usenet but I wonder if more fedi feeds will end up serving a similar purpose as usenet aggregations. I have been a user of both and an admin of neither so these may be incorrect observations.