[HN Gopher] Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
Author : donut
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-11-07 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jfm.carcosa.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (jfm.carcosa.net)
| mjmsmith wrote:
| nn[1] commands are still like muscle memory 20 years after I
| stopped using it.
|
| [1] http://www.nndev.org
| LastTrain wrote:
| Any of you archivers out there know whatever became of the Deja
| News Archive after Google bought it?
|
| https://www.wired.com/2001/02/google-buys-deja-archive/
|
| This was integrated into Google seearch, it worked great for many
| years, and then it seems Google slowly chipped away at access to
| the archive and now it all but gone.
|
| I know about the various Usenet archives on archive.org (utzoo
| (rip), some CD usenet archive), but I want that Deja archive!
| squarefoot wrote:
| Every time one finds a USENET post about a good product or
| service, is one less ad impression and potential clicks on a
| website; in other words, USENET couldn't be monetized, so it
| had to go.
|
| Google literally embraced and extinguished it by first
| incorporating the message base into the web search, but
| apparently that wasn't enough, so they at first hid the
| "Discussions" search option, so that users had to enable it
| either by some search string fu or with 3rd party browser
| extensions, then killed it entirely. From that moment, a search
| that once would return links to people discussing X now would
| mostly return links to companies selling that X. The rest is
| history.
|
| https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...
| secabeen wrote:
| It's all still there, if you know how to dig. Here are posts in
| rec.arts.drwho from before 2004-11-02:
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.drwho/search?q=before%3...
| indymike wrote:
| Deja News -> Google Groups.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Usenet sounds great! Is it actively used still?
| mattl wrote:
| 2018
| donut wrote:
| The timeliness of this article is that it compares Usenet to
| Mastodon.
| fweimer wrote:
| It's a bit strange how this article applies the past tense. Gnus
| still works fine, can be used to read mail, and despite some
| questionable design decisions such as line-based .overview files,
| can handle quite a bit of mail with its nnml backend. I don't use
| that much of Gnus functionality actually, but the threading,
| disappearance of messages I have read, and the ability to score
| down the occasional high-noise thread is well worth it. I cursed
| a lot when we switched to Gmail at work and the auto-creation of
| mailing list folders no longer worked (it's no longer predictable
| if list mail has a List-Id: header due to internal Gmail
| deduplication), but I found a reasonable solution to that as well
| (which I probably should write up and post somewhere).
|
| Some even gate mailing list mail into a news server like INN so
| that they can keep using their favorite newsreader. Thankfulyl,
| with Gnus, that isn't necessary.
| jrnichols wrote:
| I think these are very valid thoughts, even today. I loved the
| old days of telnet & Pine, and then Netscape Navigator with
| built-in email & newsgroups. Even Outlook Express did a decent
| job with NNTP.
|
| but the endless flood of spam was too much, along with the ever
| growing risk of "illegal content." Just became way too risky,
| ISPs started dropping it, and the spiral continued.
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| Google in many ways helped sink USENET by acquiring Dejanews,
| then slowly replacing the USENET functionality with Google News.
| Dejanews, in hindsight could have been a pretty reasonable proto-
| social network on its own.
|
| Not that I'm bitter...
| EricE wrote:
| It's not an accident they sunk it :(
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| Nope. :(
|
| To add some context to those not from that era. Dejanews was
| the only practical way to search USENET at all, so it was
| effectively a USENET search engine with a crude web client.
| It was pretty darned crude, but was also much easier than the
| many NNTP clients. Most people I knew used both pretty
| effectively as USENET grew.
|
| It was simple and functional, only to be slowly eroded by
| Google News.
|
| Have no idea where Google News is now. But Dejanews was in
| many ways a Reddit for that era.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+
| years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-
| existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of.
|
| Usenet clients gave their users so much power, it's almost
| criminal that modern news readers have yet to catch up to them
| several decades later.
| EricE wrote:
| The analogs to killfiles do exist in some clients:
| https://tidbits.com/2015/09/04/how-to-mute-unwanted-tweets-i...
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > Usenet clients gave their users so much power
|
| And there's the problem: when you give users power, it's harder
| to sell their eyeballs to advertisers.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how
| 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually
| non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of.
|
| Indeed and I don't think people realize how great these were.
| There's some kind of fallacy you often read when you mention
| that, which to me can be summed with the following bogus
| reasoning: _" Usenet got killed by the Web, so anything Usenet
| and Usenet clients had were wrong ways to do things"_.
|
| Killfiles/scorefiles were better than any system I've used
| since then. Nothing even comes close.
| fragmede wrote:
| Third party killfiles exist for Twitter. I was made aware of
| this via one particular topic.
| https://twitter.com/erininthemorn/status/1566988180678758400...
| donut wrote:
| How was poster identity handled in Usenet/NNTP? From what I
| remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy. Or
| was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their
| local server which require auth, you could see which server the
| message originated from and decide if the sender's address
| matched the server address...? It's been so long.)
|
| If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a somewhat
| strong notion of identity.
| manv1 wrote:
| It was the old internet. There was no identity verification.
|
| One day identity verification will occur at the network level.
| Until then, we have all this half-baked shit.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and
| spoofing was easy.
|
| Yes. Same was true of email back in the day.
| indymike wrote:
| > If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a
| somewhat strong notion of identity.
|
| Some of us would sign Usenet messages with PGP/GPG to deal with
| this. Lots of user didn't know what to do with the "geek code
| block" at the bottom of the message.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > My opinion of conversation views is that they became widespread
| because they are relatively easy to implement, and because the
| threaded interfaces in early 2000s graphical email clients were
| terrible.
|
| No, it seems more likely that it's because they're easier to
| display on mobile, so mobile first design leads to using them
| everywhere.
| papito wrote:
| I feel like there is way more talk now in general about the
| current broken state of the Internet, corporatized and designed
| to inflict productivity-destroying scatter brain on all of us.
|
| I started to aggressively use newsletters and digests of all
| sorts, for one. Politics, technology, what to stream. It is a
| SUCH better experience and a time saver.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Do you see how different this was from the infinite scroll of
| current social media web sites and apps? The idea was that your
| newsfeed would be updated periodically. Maybe hourly, maybe only
| once a day. And the goal of your newsreader was to let you be
| caught up and finished before the next time it updated.
|
| How is that desirable? Why would you want to finish reading
| something that might already be obsolete?
| rout39574 wrote:
| The idea is that you control it. You're presented with the
| place you stopped following the thread, and you can certainly
| skip to the new hotness if you like, but if you want the
| intervening context it's right there.
|
| That "maybe obsolete" state is -your- reading state.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Anybody have any modern recommendations for file sharing on
| usenet? I have heard there are a lot of obscure stuff still there
| that you will not find anywhere else (not even specifically
| talking about pirating here - legal stuff as well)
| halfbrite wrote:
| Anyone looking to create a new social network should certainly
| take cues from Usenet - of course, it was eventually over taken
| by forums on the web.
|
| Visiting Usenet today though will only lead to sadness, unless
| you're looking for something you shouldn't be or enjoy endless
| spam.
| pacman128 wrote:
| I just recently started looking back at one of the groups I
| frequently read years ago and found that there was a small
| community still using it. Even recognized a few of them. The
| trolls and spammers were gone.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Some are still going..
|
| https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/sci.electronics.design
|
| https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/comp.arch
|
| https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.arts.sf.written
|
| https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.radio.amateur.misc
|
| https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/comp.compilers
| gw98 wrote:
| Crikey sci.electronics.design is a mess now (was active
| over 20 years ago on it).
| [deleted]
| pacman128 wrote:
| rec.arts.sf.written was the one I was referring to.
| anthk wrote:
| Killfiles under slrn solved this fastly enough.
| jjav wrote:
| Usenet is alive, just very low traffic these days. I still read
| it every week. The spammers have mostly left since it's not an
| interesting target anymore.
| iisan7 wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again. With buzz
| about moving to Mastodon, I was just thinking about why usenet
| couldn't be a viable social media platform as it represents so
| much of what people like about the fediverse, and then some. It
| would be fascinating to see the usenet protocol repurposed and
| new clients and newsgroups built upon lessons from the past
| decade.
| donut wrote:
| > Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again.
|
| Right? It was such a good time :-) You're welcome.
|
| > why usenet couldn't be a viable social media platform
|
| I wonder if identity plays a role here. Centralizing points
| (likes, retweets, etc) drives people to work on getting
| attention with their posts, to drive engagement, but also
| invites troublemakers and controversy.
| floren wrote:
| It's pretty easy to set up your own INN2 servers and have them
| exchange their own hierarchy. However it also feels like
| there's just a ton of features and options in there which
| mostly make it very challenging to set up the simple case (and
| leave you feeling like you've left holes open). I've never
| really dug into the NNTP spec but it seems like it might be
| pretty easy to write your own implementation which just focuses
| on the common use-case.
| kkfx wrote:
| > Killfiles and Scorefiles
|
| That's one of the most important thing most people ignore: they
| means we can have our PERSONAL aggregator instead of using
| someone else algorithms and censorship. Sure at usenet time (or
| back at Xerox time where these concept was implemented for the
| first time in known history) the level of scoring and self-
| censoring technique was limited but nowadays it's a CENTRAL
| point. Usenet is a decentralized network no one own, no one can
| really censor at a whole and aggregators who are needed for
| anything high volumes are personal things, posts can be archived
| locally so they do not disappear and so on.
|
| Coupled and integrated (like Gnus offer) with RSS feeds mails and
| in the case of Gnus also HN (nnhackernews backend) or Reddit
| (nnreddit) we can have a CONSISTENT and LOCAL UIs for ALL our
| public information/communication infra in a robust yet simple
| manner. That's the classic nuclear war resilient internet vs the
| modern centralized and censored web.
|
| Oh BTW usenet today it's almost abandoned, but some have
| rediscovered it for mostly piracy as an alternative to
| bittorrent. It's relevant because it means that while normally
| binary groups in a modern world are a bit odd they perform well
| enough for such big file sharing usage.
|
| Or, long story short: evolving these tools we can have a modern
| classic desktop who happen to be a human PERSONAL exobrain, work
| desk, tool, with the human at the center. With the modern web and
| relevant WebVMs we get instead modern dumb terminals of modern
| mainframes.
|
| Do you prefer owning nothing "and being happy" like the infamous
| WEF/2030 video OR you prefer own your small slice of the world
| peer between peers?
| donut wrote:
| > have our PERSONAL aggregator
|
| That's the dream, isn't it.
|
| So if there are 100 people whose messages you willingly watch,
| how do you discover new people? (Maybe you do so organically
| when they mention them?)
|
| And if you _do_ allow yourself to taste from the firehose of
| unfiltered messages, a single personal list of users/messages
| wouldn't scale and you have the classic spam problem. Do you
| share your rules with others (and form an aggregation like
| https://www.dnsbl.info/)?
|
| Curious what you think about https://atproto.com/:
| Algorithmic choice Control how you see the world
| through an open market of algorithms.
| neilv wrote:
| In addition to the `trn` and Gnus readers that the article
| mentions, another great one was `strn`.
|
| They were much more powerful than any other forum interface I've
| seen since. Though the very compact thread views like in
| `old.reddit.com` and HN are nice.
| manv1 wrote:
| Don't forget Nuntius, which was the best NNTP mac client. MT-
| NewsWatcher was pretty good too.
|
| Good times.
| fweimer wrote:
| Uhm, do you mean slrn? Never heard of strn (but that doesn't
| mean anything).
| neilv wrote:
| Oh yeah, `slrn` is another good one, but there was also an
| `strn`.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| slrn: from John Davis, author of JED editor..
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like
| Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads,
| and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you
| don't pay a monthly subscription to them). _Way_ back, it used to
| be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok,
| because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how
| to use it, so you weren 't creating a lot of load on your ISP.
| Even then, the NNTP server didn't carry much content, wasn't well
| maintained, didn't save much, so you had to pay _more_ for a
| third-party server if you wanted to participate.
|
| My hope for Usenet back in the day was a fully decentralized
| implementation that would allow each Usenet client to act as a
| client as well as a mini-server to cut the middleman out. Freenet
| (and I2P, I think) was sort of based on this idea at a very high
| level, but went in sort of a weird way (and didn't build on NNTP
| either).
| Mc91 wrote:
| > My hope for Usenet back in the day was a fully decentralized
| implementation that would allow each Usenet client to act as a
| client as well as a mini-server to cut the middleman out.
|
| Gnutella started as this, but for a lot of reasons it didn't
| work for what it did, with every node sending broadcast to
| every other mode. The network became a number of federated
| super-nodes, or ultra-peers, or whatever you'd call them. These
| would be nodes that had a decent uptime, had a steady network
| connection, could handle a number of connections etc.
| darrenf wrote:
| > _Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with
| your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who
| knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren 't creating
| a lot of load on your ISP. Even then, the NNTP server didn't
| carry much content, wasn't well maintained, didn't save much_
|
| In the UK, Demon Internet in the 90s maintained a usenet server
| for customers _and_ one for non-customers
| (pubnews.demon.co.uk). They carried plenty, had decent
| retention, and were very well maintained. And busy too. Demon
| were the largest consumer ISP at the time IIRC. So, at least
| over here, what you say doesn't match my recollections.
|
| (I worked at Demon in 1998; if either news server went down I
| had to fix it if I could, or raise 3rd line expertise
| otherwise, 24/7)
| Melatonic wrote:
| Anything to do with the later Demonoid?
| rjsw wrote:
| There are free servers, they don't hold binary groups but they
| work fine.
| dsr_ wrote:
| In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform
| machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of
| RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks. At times Usenet ate most of a T1
| (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe).
|
| So if you want Usenet, right now, every $5/month minimal VM
| that I'm aware of has more than enough CPU, RAM, disk and I/O
| to support you and two dozen friends, as long as you don't take
| binaries froups.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that 's a 1.5Mb/s
| pipe)._
|
| How much of that was due to alt.binaries.*?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| My first thought too! Probably 99%.
| indymike wrote:
| > How much of that was due to alt.binaries. _?
|
| Most ISPs stopped carrying _.binaries.* groups because of
| this.
| fweimer wrote:
| Google still offers free Usenet access, but alas not over NNTP
| (I think).
|
| These days, with reasonably cheap virtual servers and reduced
| Usenet traffic, you can just run your own server after finding
| one or two peers to exchange articles with. The Debian
| packaging of INN is quite good, I think. It's still a bit of
| work to set up things, but so is reading and writing articles.
|
| All of this applies to the text-only Usenet. A lot of for-pay
| Usenet was actually about access to binary-only groups with
| content of questionable copyright status (or even legality,
| depending on country). I don't know if that's still a thing
| today. The bandwidth requirements for these binary-only groups
| could be significant.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Sounds like NNTP combined with BitTorrent..
|
| Back in the day I remember dreaming ways to optimize the NNTP
| server- surely there was a better way than storing each article
| in a separate file.. but actually it was a very convenient to
| have a shell account on the same system that ran the server.
| This is why I enjoyed TheWorld (Software Tool & Die). You could
| cat the articles if you wanted.
|
| /usr/spool/news, C-News, innd (Rich $alz!), it's all coming
| back..
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| When you did you get on TheWorld? What was it like?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| You are right the decent high retention + SSL NNTP providers
| cost at least $6/mo [0]. There are some free ones [1] but I
| have never tried them. I've heard they are sometimes slow and
| lack SSL. I liked the speed of Giganews for binaries but had
| problems canceling my account and had to call someone.
|
| [0] - https://www.techradar.com/best/best-usenet-providers
|
| [1] -
| https://teddit.zaggy.nl/r/usenet/comments/6l8h82/free_usenet...
| fweimer wrote:
| I think news.individual.net only charges 10 EUR per year, but
| is strictly text-only of course.
| bbanyc wrote:
| The lack of a business model is why any attempt to revive
| Usenet or run a new federated protocol like Mastodon is
| probably not going to get anywhere. Somebody's got to pay for
| it, and the quality of discussion isn't nearly good enough to
| attract paying customers. (The binaries may be, but isn't it
| silly to pay for piracy?) Ad-supported services have bad
| incentives all around, but nobody's ever come up with an
| alternative way to pay for it, aside from being small enough
| that voluntary donations will do.
| anthk wrote:
| Usenet isn't just for piracy.
| onion2k wrote:
| No. We also used it for porn and flame wars.
| robomartin wrote:
| Some of the most interesting and intellectually interesting
| conversations I have every had online were on USENET back in the
| 80's. I literally made friends all over the world in fields
| spanning areas from model aircraft to electronics, software
| development and aerospace. Met a bunch of them. Visited each
| others' homes. Etc.
|
| Today? Geez. No comment. Every meaningful relationship I have
| online is from people I knew and met in real life, some of them a
| decade or more ago.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I remember as a little kid getting some dude in Australia to
| somehow call us ( I believe over some type of IP phone or
| something) and he put the phone up next to the australian
| motoGP FM radio announcement. This was by far the best way to
| get the most up to date announcing on races. Now its so easy !
| LastTrain wrote:
| Usenet worked until the demographic changed.
| donut wrote:
| Is this a reference to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September?
| antod wrote:
| I seem to remember one reason usenet worked so well was the
| pretty stringent insistence on good netiquette. Of course it
| wasn't foolproof, but nearly all people wanted to follow the
| implied rules most of the time.
|
| Todays internet demographics and social media landscape though
| probably makes Eternal September pale into insignificance.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I agree. While spam and bad actors did exist, the crowd size
| was so small most of the time and the amount of spam tended to
| be far more limited and typically had a human at the other side
| posting the crap.
|
| If you open up an HTTP POST api these days that publicly listed
| the amount of crap that will be posted to it is legion. You'll
| have spammers and spammers bots hit it endlessly. You'll have
| broken scripts pound at it till the end of time. You'll have
| clever users figure out how to turn it into a data storage API.
| You'll have every dark thing that hides in the shadows of
| humanity use you as its new cave. If you allow binary uploads
| then that API is now a porn site or serving warez. The people
| pushing the most questionable stuff will come from a vast range
| of proxied IPs and infected jumpboxes.
|
| It's been some years now since I've been in charge of managing
| servers that require public facing internet presence and I
| cannot tell you how glad I am because of it. Attempting to
| maintain operational integrity on the open internet is like
| attempting to maintain structural integrity in a blast furnace.
| EricE wrote:
| He's spot on about the quality of clients for social feeds.
| Tweetbot is the only way I use Twitter. Cuts out all the
| algorithmic manipulation of my feed and has excellent controls to
| allow me to parse my feed and weed out the garbage. There are
| many tech people I wouldn't be able to follow if I wasn't able to
| strip out the political garbage.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-07 23:01 UTC)