[HN Gopher] USENET rises again?
___________________________________________________________________
USENET rises again?
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 259 points
Date : 2023-08-31 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| nullc wrote:
| The "fediverse" failed to learn from usenet and is doomed to
| repeat it.
|
| Usenet's downfall came from no management of resource usage or
| abuse-management costs (both of the spam and the "that message is
| illegal" sort).
|
| Sites dealt with mounting costs by outsourcing to specialists,
| which lost a lot of usenet's distributed advantages (e.g. local
| copies providing for ultra low latency access, availability
| during outages, traffic sharing when many users were using the
| same groups, only having to appeal to your choice of local
| authorities to carry something rather than distant ones that
| didn't get a crap about you, etc).
|
| Due to overhead costs it's cheaper for fewer providers to support
| more users, this along with acquisitions caused the
| centralization onto a few and then essentially one usenet
| provider who then implemented policy (monetization schemes,
| walled gardens, censorship) that eliminated the residual benefits
| of usenet over alternatives. The alternatives were more flexible,
| and had less baggage (particularly the quasi-monopoly provider),
| and with no reason left to use usenet over them eventually they
| took over.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I wouldn't consider Usenet a social network.
|
| I never liked Usenet, but when I was a teenager I posted some
| embarrassing, angsty, awkward messages in the alt.* space, so I
| was glad for many reasons when it rightly died off. If it rises,
| phoenix-like, I probably still won't use it. And if those
| messages (which I have searched for since) are recovered, I'll
| blame it on that one guy in Florida who has my same name.
| rout39574 wrote:
| Can you articulate the ways in which it seems not-a-social-
| network to you?
|
| Comparison with reddit might be useful.
|
| The only fundamental distinction I can draw is that there's no
| unified source of identity in usenet. All the rest of the
| differences come down to moderation policies.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I consider something a social network when it is designed to
| create and make use of a graph of relationships between
| people. This is distinct from social _media_ , though we use
| the two interchangeably a lot of the time. The "network" part
| is about the graph of relationships, the "social" part is
| about people (and not servers, as I suppose is the case with
| Usenet).
|
| I'm not sure about Reddit, I don't use it often, but if you
| can only follow forums and not people, I would not call it a
| social network either.
| rout39574 wrote:
| I agree:
|
| > designed to create and make use of a graph of
| relationships between people.
|
| I assert that a universe of people maintaining killfiles is
| exactly this. It is the default-trust map of social
| network, in which one imagines that the exceptional cases
| are those whom one wishes to shun.
|
| I think a requirement that one be able to "follow a
| person", that is to say watch all the things that
| individual says, is excessive. We're getting down into the
| weeds here, but I think following topics and threads are
| much more useful than following humans.
| hollerith wrote:
| "Social media" _to me_ refers only to services owned and
| controlled by a corporation (or maybe a non-profit
| organization similar to how the Guardian newpaper is owned
| by a non-profit) and targeted at average consumers, not
| just techies. Although there have been corporations (e.g.,
| ISPs, Clarinet, Deja News) involved with Usenet, no one
| (corporation, organization, person) has ever owned or
| controlled Usenet. "The Big-8 board is the closest thing
| it has to a central governing authority," says the OP, but
| it has only a tiny fraction of the level of control over
| Usenet that, e.g., Reddit, Inc, has over Reddit.
|
| Before the rise of the web, Usenet definitely was the front
| page of the internet, though--to a greater degree than
| Reddit ever was.
|
| Part of the nostalgia for Usenet I think is nostalgia for a
| time when corporations had very little influence on the
| internet. Although most of the people running Usenet (and
| maintaining Usenet software) in the 1980s and early 1990s
| were involved with software and the Internet as part of
| their job, running Usenet was not part of their job
| description.
|
| IRC and the first massively-multiplayer online games (which
| were text-only and called MUDs) were the same way.
|
| Till the early 1990s the US government paid most of the
| bills for running the internet, but used its influence very
| sparingly: there was a rule against commercial activity
| (which I think was motivated by appeasing commercial
| interests worried that the internet would compete with
| their services) and there were attempts made to make it
| less likely that the internet would get criticized by
| Congresspersons and journalists as an expensive waste of
| money: e.g., Jerry Pournelle's getting kicked off MIT's
| terminal servers circa 1985 out of fear that he would be
| careless in how he would write about the internet. And that
| is the extent of the rules imposed by the US gov that I
| know about.
| rout39574 wrote:
| Why do you find central corporate control to be a
| defining feature? I am drawn much more to the technical
| features of the system.
|
| I think of IRC, Mastadon, and Jabber as social networks;
| If you rule out Jabber it seems to me you must also rule
| out AIM.
|
| Perhaps we're fumbling for a new vocabulary term, and
| "Social network" is too vague to be effective.
| hollerith wrote:
| >Perhaps . . . "Social network" is too vague to be
| effective.
|
| I was talking about the term "social media".
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think early on, there was no front page of the
| internet. It would have been your university's telnet or
| gopher server or something. But really there wasn't one.
| I don't think it was Usenet, certainly. With the early
| web, Yahoo might have been the closest thing. I don't
| think there could be anything like centralization or
| aggregation (I mean: a single place people went to by
| default) until the browser became ubiquitous, which in my
| personal history marks the end of the beginning, or the
| beginning of the middle phase of the internet. I agree
| that many people spent a lot of time on Usenet, but I
| think many more people couldn't be bothered.
|
| I learned basic scripting by writing rooms and content
| for MUDs, I love them and sometimes wistfully think about
| starting one up.
| hollerith wrote:
| Moderation policies matter a lot. The tech behind Usenet
| makes moderation much more costly than it is on anything
| commonly called a social network (and the people running
| Usenet are opposed to moderation of anything other than
| outright spam or so that's how it always was when I stopped
| paying attention about 15 years ago).
| rout39574 wrote:
| I agree that moderation policies are important. But I think
| it's missing a point to decide that "A social network with
| bad moderation policies" is therefore not a social network.
|
| Easy comparison: Mastadon has distributed identity, and
| localized management of moderation. Is this sufficient that
| we should deem it "not a social network"? I think not.
|
| I think there was no real consensus in USENET towards the
| appropriate degree of moderation, rather several standing
| waves of opinion. All the species of technically simple
| moderation patterns were present there: A species of
| subscriber, or every message approved (basically only a
| radically small set of approved posters) and so on. Since
| some of the newsgroups are functionally archives of mailing
| lists, there's a whole additional universe of moderation
| techniques applied "upstream".
| hollerith wrote:
| >All the species of technically simple moderation
| patterns were present there
|
| I consider voting (allowing readers to upvote and
| downvote, which is extremely quick and easy compared to
| writing a comment) an important technically simple
| moderation pattern, and I'd be very surprised to learn
| the voting on Usenet articles was ever possible.
| hollerith wrote:
| >Mastadon has distributed identity, and localized
| management of moderation. Is this sufficient that we
| should deem it "not a social network"? I think not.
|
| Good point. Something created for the explicit purpose of
| competing with (in the sense of taking users away from) a
| social network should be called a social network.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Usenet is and remains, if not entirely dead, at best a zombie.
| Killed by spammers first, AOL second and the people that would
| subsequently ruin BitTorrent, like, forever.
|
| Technology choices inspired by nostalgia are not _always_ the
| best bet, but if you 're going all the way, I suggest a return to
| FidoNet Echomail.
|
| http://ftsc.org/docs/fts-0004.001 should get you started, and I'm
| sure you'll figure out a way to make node assignments
| decentralized.
|
| 2:285/11.2 signing off. But I still have some bad C code
| implementing an Echomail processor, if you need it...
| thenose wrote:
| Would you mind expanding on what you meant about BitTorrent? It
| seems like it's one of the few decentralized technologies that
| hasn't been ruined.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Is this a good-faith question, or are you truly not aware of
| the extreme scale of the copyright infringement that
| BitTorrent is used for? (And by that, I mean, that any
| BitTorrent use is automatically associated with excessive
| bandwidth usage and incoming legal threats, unlike, say, a
| usable P2P technology)
| thenose wrote:
| The fact that copyright infringement works in spite of
| attempts to kill it seems to be proof that BitTorrent is
| well-designed, rather than evidence it's broken. What else
| would it be associated with? People do use it to distribute
| large datasets, but even those have fallen into the
| infringement category.
|
| And of course; good faith is all that we have here.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Ah, OK, you're one of _those_ people.
|
| So, to rephrase things: because of _you_ , Usenet is
| dead. And BitTorrent is dead. And any future technology
| anything like it will be dead-on-arrival, because _you_
| simply don 't grok how the world works.
|
| And I'm _very_ well aware that "the way the world works"
| is in direct conflict with "the way you think the world
| _should_ be working ", but that's the exact issue here.
|
| You are Eternal September, personified. Good luck with
| that!
| thenose wrote:
| If you'd care to point out exactly what you mean, I might
| avoid those traits. But as it stands I have no idea what
| you're talking about, though I'm familiar with Eternal
| September.
|
| My question was, how did you envision BitTorrent working?
| tptacek wrote:
| Whatever your feelings are about copyright infringement,
| the fact is that it killed Usenet, by making it
| intractable for independents to run full-feed Usenet
| servers (it was simply too expensive, and the work to
| keep up with the binaries drastically reduced the quality
| of service for the text posts). The result was a system
| that really _only_ served copyright infringement, because
| those were the users anyone seriously investing in Usenet
| infrastructure were serving.
| jszymborski wrote:
| So I just hopped on Usenet via eternal-september for the first
| time and checked some of the can.* boards to check in with my
| fellow countrymen.
|
| Wow, it's like I'm reading a collection of everyone's spam folder
| with some flares of racism for good measure.
|
| Is there _any_ moderation on Usenet? How do I get it?
|
| For now I think I'll stick to Mastodon (Canadians, join
| cosocial.ca co-op!)
| spc476 wrote:
| Yes, there are moderated groups. I even know of a moderated
| group without a moderator (alt.hackers) which is the point.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Am I missing the "rises again like a Phoenix" part? This article
| is just a brief description of what Usenet is, for people under
| 45 years of age. There's nothing in here about Usenet usage being
| on the rise, or anything like that.
|
| This article talks about Google Groups in the present tense, even
| though its Usenet hosting permanently ceased around 8 years ago.
| fweimer wrote:
| Some parts of Google's bi-directional gateway are still up.
| These look current relative to the NNTP Usenet:
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/de.soc.recht.steuern+buchfuehrun...
| https://groups.google.com/g/de.soc.recht.misc
|
| (The second group even has some recent spam in it, which is
| rare nowadays.)
| 0xJRS wrote:
| > "and now that there's an active board again, it has been
| busy."
| troymc wrote:
| The Big-8 Board was re-established, or if you like, it rose
| from the ashes like a Phoenix. (The Phoenix story is about one
| bird coming back to life; there's nothing about an increase in
| the size of some group.)
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Where is that hosted?
| jedberg wrote:
| The board is active again and new newsgroups have been created
| for the first time in years (decades?).
|
| That's the rising again part.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I don't have any affiliation with any provider but I contribute
| or maintain most of the Usenet clients for Gentoo. As others have
| stated the majority of Usenet subscribers now use it for binary
| groups, not text groups. I use it for both. Rather than talk
| about whether it should or shouldn't come back I'm just going to
| give a starting point to view text groups. There's enough
| information on handling binary groups. (/r/usenet is probably a
| good starting point for info, SABnzbd is the binary client you'd
| probably want)
|
| To get access: If you're looking to get into it and browse
| around, it's unlikely that your ISP provides free NNTP server
| access. Mine did when I first got into it in the mid-2000's but
| they don't anymore. https://news.gmane.io/ provides a free NNTP
| interface to just mailing lists if you're looking to test clients
| without paying money. If you want cheap access to all of it from
| a provider that has fully working headers, $2 will get you a 2GB
| non-expiring account at https://usenet-
| news.net/index1.php?url=home that should last a very long time
| for text groups.
|
| As for clients, on mobile there's nothing available for android
| last I've checked. On iOS there's NewsTap, it's not the best app
| but it works. Main complaints I have is it fetches using single
| connection so it's slow to update large newsgroups and it doesn't
| appear to have a normal killfile support so you can't filter very
| well. This is honestly the main client I use for the few groups I
| subscribe to since it's convenient.
|
| Thunderbird I'm told some people like. I can't recommend it at
| all, it has non-working TLS support for NNTP which seems like a
| joke but I assure you it is not. Going on 16+ years of ignoring
| RFC4642: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420262 The
| only way to workaround it beside using unencrypted NNTP servers
| is to run a local TLS proxy on your system or just use
| unencrypted NNTP connections.
|
| Pan is an ok GUI alternative on Linux, it had fallen into severe
| coderot and at least Gentoo had dropped it but is actively
| maintained again: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pan My main
| complaint is it crashes from time to time. But it has working TLS
| so there's that. I've picked up maintaining it in the GURU repo
| as I don't feel it's stable enough to re-add to the main package
| repo yet.
|
| Tin is probably the best CLI client. If you can get it started
| and connected to your provider it just works without fuss. Main
| gripe is the startup flags and having to manually write config
| file, it pretty much requires reading manpage. By default it'll
| connect to gmane though so you can mess around with that.
|
| On Windows I've only really used Newsleecher briefly. It has a
| neat feature of having its own header index. This was useful
| because my main Usenet provider switched upstream providers and
| broke headers for most of my text groups. I could fetch articles
| from the server but without working headers I wouldn't know the
| articles were there in the first place. This is a side effect of
| most providers focusing on binary subscribers.
|
| Spam is still an issue but it's less an issue than what it was.
| Most is easy to filter and there's only a few major spammers
| (like the dude ranting in allcaps Italian about politicians). The
| main 'spam' is clueless Google Groups users responding to 25 year
| old dead threads that it is unlikely your Usenet provider still
| carries. The biggest hurdle a new user will have is finding
| active groups. Some I'm in only get a few posts per year but are
| technically active (like the Thinkpad related ones). There's a
| few that get tons of posts daily.
| cowmix wrote:
| Usenet is why I stared my ISP in '93. I loved it -- but as many
| people have commented here, the spam got pretty nutty for while.
| In fact, THIS happened on my watch.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/
| squarefoot wrote:
| I still am on USENET since the 90s. Although I love it for its
| simplicity, its protocol was conceived when the Internet was
| almost exclusively populated by educated people. As a result, it
| has no antibodies against trolls and spammers and can be
| exploited very easily. I believe we'd have no other choice than
| to extend the NNTP protocol with some form of protection against
| that, otherwise as soon as a group attracts a number of people,
| it will immediately be targeted by spammers, scammers and trolls.
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| For some of us usenet never died. Use cases might have changed
| though. Iykyk.
| pyrophane wrote:
| The news here is that a board oversees the "big 8" Usenet
| hierarchies has been re-established and is actively
| adding/removing groups.
|
| "Rises like a phoenix" is a bit hyperbolic.
| dpe82 wrote:
| > "Rises like a phoenix" is a bit hyperbolic.
|
| If it weren't hyperbolic and a tad over the top, it wouldn't be
| The Register.
| bbarnett wrote:
| A good read, but I'm pretty sure that there was usenet spam
| before then.
|
| I was looking through my archives of old text files a decade
| ago, and noticed that, to my horror, in 1982, I had spammed
| Punternet for water filters I was trying to sell as a teenager.
| Punternet was like Fidonet, but for C64 Punter BBS systems.
|
| And I'm sure someone spammed before me.
|
| Amusingly, I received a reply from someone on Texas, which blew
| my mind in 82, in Canada.
| wackget wrote:
| As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used Usenet
| and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too much
| friction.
|
| You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a
| subscription to an indexer, plus client software. All of this to
| access what is essentially a pure text forum.
|
| Frankly I am not interested in jumping through hoops to access
| something which an "average person" would have no hope in hell of
| figuring out. Maybe that's part of the attraction, that only
| dedicated geeks will use it?
| pmarreck wrote:
| As a 51 year old programmer, you really missed out on some cool
| discussion back in the day. But yes, honestly, I haven't done
| anything Usenet in years save for the occasional Google result
| that lands on a Google Groups URL.
|
| Honestly it might be worth resurrecting the protocol to run
| your own Usenet web UI just for weekend funsies.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Back In The Day, the barrier to entry was low. Most Unix boxes
| had the "rn" or "trn" newsreaders installed, and VMS also had
| one (though I don't recall its name). It was as easy to get
| into as email.
| 876978095789789 wrote:
| > As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used
| Usenet and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too
| much friction.
|
| Really? I'm old enough to remember when Google bought Deja, and
| with it suddenly came the ability to search the entire Usenet
| archive going back to its inception, through the Google Groups
| interface. Being able to search the archives of
| comp.lang.whatever was a great educational and productivity
| booster, like Stackoverflow before SO.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a
| subscription to an indexer, plus client software._
|
| When Usenet was big, you didn't need a paid subscription.
| Almost every ISP included it for free.
|
| I never heard of an indexer.
|
| Client software came with your operating system, or it was
| built in to your e-mail client, or you could download for free.
|
| As for today -- yes, how awful that you might have to pay for
| something. Completely terrible. It might even be half the price
| of a cup of coffee. Completely unacceptable to have to give
| someone money for something of value. Terrible.
|
| Much better to lock oneself inside the mink-lined, free,
| censored, AI-curated cages of the big data corps. Not thinking
| is always so much easier and more comfortable than thinking.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Having been in the IT industry since 1992 - I did use a free
| Usenet server, probably provided by my ISP.
|
| Used the "comp.*" heirarchy mostly, discussing technical topics
| and answering questions - in 1996, a publisher (Wiley!) sent me
| a box of books - apparently I had helped one of their authors
| and they wanted to thank me.
|
| On-one-hand, I would like to try it again - OTOH, I think spam
| and/or bots would overwhelm it to the point of uselessness.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| The article links to a free Usenet provider. I'm sure there are
| others also.
|
| The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries
| (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and
| ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little
| to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post
| on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated
| content.
|
| That was really one of the two things that killed Usenet in the
| 2000's. One was the rise of phpBB forums, and then Reddit. The
| other was the seediness of the Usenet binaries scene. As the
| "legit" users migrated to web-based forums, the pirates made up
| a larger and larger portion of those staying behind, and
| eventually the network effort flowed in reverse until critical
| mass was lost.
|
| I deeply miss that old Usenet culture of the 1990's. In
| comparison to HN and _especially_ Reddit, Usenet was far less
| reverent, frumpy, and up-its-own-ass politically and socially.
| At the same time, it 's impossible to try to recreate that on a
| forum today, without it breaking down into nothing but alt-
| right hate speech. The 1990's was a fun and quirky little
| period of Internet sanity, made possible only by how small and
| outside the mainstream the Internet still was.
| devbent wrote:
| The internet used to have a barrier to entry. That barrier is
| what helped ensure quality.
|
| If the only people who can join are those who are passionate
| enough to read a lot of documentation and jump through a lot
| of hoops, yeah, the quality of discourse will be better.
|
| Heck even /. Had better trolls in the day than what reddit
| has now.
| tptacek wrote:
| Binaries also forced the centralization of Usenet, so that
| regional ISPs had no incentive to do anything but outsource
| it. It was unbelievably annoying to host a full-feed Usenet
| server in the late 1990s, and if you hosted anything less
| than one, people would arrange boycotts; better not to host
| Usenet at all.
|
| Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than
| the original.
| queuebert wrote:
| > Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture
| than the original.
|
| Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that
| possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get
| spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless
| popularity contest with votes and mods.
| tptacek wrote:
| Usenet was also censored. Like Reddit, much of it was a
| free-for-all, but not all of it.
|
| But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum
| of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other
| considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who
| suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's
| taking for granted really basic things, like search, that
| were space alien tech on Usenet.
|
| Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize
| it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing
| up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward
| a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is
| something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and
| however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon
| server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse
| on Usenet.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Usenet was definitely slow (very, _very_ slow, even), in
| the sense that posts made in the US might take up to 18
| hours (or whenever dial-up got "cheap") to show up in
| the rest of the world, or vice versa. Even posts between
| locally-adjacent sites might take a few hours to
| propagate. This may, incidentally, help to explain why
| discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be
| superior to that, say, on Twitter. But YMMV.
|
| Also, Usenet was _very_ much censored, in the sense that
| most sites would not even _think_ about carrying most
| groups. In particular, alt.* and *.binaries.* would be
| unavailable pretty much anywhere that had "cost of
| bandwidth" or "reputation" concerns.
|
| And if you repeatedly posted abusive content to any
| Usenet group, you can _bet_ that your account and /or
| entire site would be "cancelled" from the network pretty
| quickly by the infamous "Usenet cabal" (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal). Not to
| mention that Usenet was the entire origin for the concept
| of the "killfile".
|
| Finally, the most popular Usenet hubs (say, UUnet) were
| _very_ much for-profit...
| jjav wrote:
| > (or whenever dial-up got "cheap")
|
| Right, but that was not due to nntp, it was due to the
| bandwidth economics of the times. I ran a small site that
| only connected once a day when the phone call was
| cheaper. But if you have a permanent connection largely
| unconstrained on bandwidth, it'll be faster.
|
| > This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse
| on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to
| that, say, on Twitter.
|
| But yes, that as well. When a response takes at least 2
| days, there is an incentive to write well and thoroughly.
| The instant response chat-type forums of today encourage
| meaningless ping-pong responses.
|
| > Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that
| most sites would not even think about carrying most
| groups
|
| This is a very fundamental difference between a
| distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized
| walled garden. A specific usenet site, as you say, might
| choose to not carry certain newsgroups. That is local
| control, not usenet censorship. Usenet as a whole still
| distributes it. If you want access you can just switch to
| a different usenet provider. You can also run your own
| provider! That's what makes it so wonderful. You are in
| control, not some single central site. There _is no_
| central site.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| When Australia joined Usenet in 1983, connections were
| via airmailed data tapes, updated weekly:
|
| <http://article.olduse.net/467@sdchema.UUCP>
|
| This would mean that part of the bang path for Bob
| Kummerfeld's email address was in fact a 747:
| "!sdchema!sydney!bob"
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting
| binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the
| bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices.
| There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account
| just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download
| porn or other pirated content.
|
| This may reflect the state today, but back in the late 90's
| and early 00's, it was not. Even for the pure text forums,
| you had to pay someone. In the earlier days it was included
| in the ISP package, so you wouldn't see the costs. Or via
| your university. But I distinctly remember when my university
| dropped USENET lots of people complained because they
| couldn't get free access elsewhere.
|
| For me: I used BBS's before I used USENET. BBS groups
| ("conferences") were much more civil, and had much better
| discourse. The moderation was very effective. When I moved to
| USENET, it was quite chaotic by comparison. And then with the
| onset of spam, I went elsewhere.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > But I distinctly remember when my university dropped
| USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get
| free access elsewhere.
|
| Unless they dropped it _really_ early, there was
| dejanews/google groups, surely?
| BeetleB wrote:
| Was dejanews free? And could you access it with a proper
| news reader?
|
| Google Groups's interface sucks by comparison.
| tptacek wrote:
| You could post to it for free, but it was extremely
| clunky.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| If you want to live those good old BBS days again -
| https://www.telnet.org/htm/places.htm
|
| I played a few games of Tradewars on one of these a while
| ago. It sure brought back the days of being a sysop of my
| local BBS growing up.
| nunobrito wrote:
| telnet cavebbs.homeip.net
|
| Everyone is playing LORD (Legend Of the Red Dragon)
| there.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Life was good when Unison was still being maintained
|
| https://blog.panic.com/unison-2/ https://panic.com/blog/the-
| future-of-unison/
|
| https://www.astraweb.com is the best provider I know
| rnk wrote:
| The article notes you can get a free read/write subscription at
| https://www.eternal-september.org/.
| troymc wrote:
| The "high" barrier to entry _does_ act as a filter today, but I
| should add that in the 1990s, it was considered relatively
| easy, not so different from using email; it 's only with the
| existence of modern social networks that the access steps seem
| relatively difficult.
|
| P.S. For many Usenet groups, you don't need to pay anything to
| get access.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| It's still as easy as setting up email. You have a username,
| a password, and a hostname for the server. Then you're off to
| the races.
| jtode wrote:
| I haven't looked in a long time, but the last time I did look,
| there were any number of places you could connect to gratis,
| but which do not carry binaries groups. A non-binary usenet
| server is lightweight enough to run on the 80s Internet so the
| costs of operation without all that storage and retention is
| pretty minimal.
| pmontra wrote:
| I remember that setting up a server was not too much of a big
| deal in the late 80s /early 90s. We did it for our university.
| I can't remember how we federated (the word was different back
| then). We definitely didn't have to pay anything to the server
| (or servers?) we were getting news from and sending our
| messages to.
|
| Anyway, this is probably an even higher hoop to jump through.
| jjav wrote:
| > As a programmer of over 30 years...
|
| > You need a paid (!) subscription
|
| 30 years ago (and I'd say even 20 years ago) every ISP had
| their own usenet feed just like they had their own email
| server. It's only fairly recently this has become a bit of a
| barrier (although as many have noted in this discussion, free
| ones exist so not much of a barrier). My ISP discontinued their
| usenet server in 2016, fairly recently.
|
| Installing a client is one package-install command away, not
| exactly a barrier.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The article pointed out that Eternal September offers free
| subscriptions.
|
| I'm not sure what an "indexer" is, such that you'd need to
| subscribe to it; is that some kind of online service like Deja
| News? I used to just download everything that appeared on the
| handful of groups that interested me, and store it locally.
| Then I could do local searches.
|
| That "store locally" capability wasn't some bag of bash scripts
| I cobbled together; I thought all newsreaders could do that
| natively.
| glonq wrote:
| ~30 years ago, the barrier to entry was minimal. There were
| many free news servers out there, and it was common for your
| ISP to offer one. Good client software was easy to find
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort%C3%A9_Agent)
|
| And yeah, the best part about usenet was that there were fewer
| "average people" on there. The Internet was great before AoL
| connected everybody else to it ;)
| tigereyeTO wrote:
| Sounds like you're misinformed.
|
| Text-only newsgroup servers are free. You only need to use/pay
| for indexers if you're scouring many groups for specific
| keywords.
|
| If you're subscribing to specific text groups you don't need to
| search an index for the whole net. You can just scroll to the
| top and read what you missed since last session
|
| The barrier of entry is learning how to use a piece of software
| like Thunderbird. It's no larger than email. If you figured
| that one out, you can figure out newsgroups too.
|
| I remember when everyone was deriding "the internet" and
| "email" as being too cumbersome for an "average person" to
| figure out, having too many "hoops" to jump through to use it.
|
| Thanks for the nostalgia, wackget
| scelerat wrote:
| > There is way too much friction
|
| A lot of the early ISPs, 1993-early 2000s, had free nntp/usenet
| services. The "friction" of using usenet was not any greater
| that the friction of launching an email client, an ftp or
| gopher session, or launching Mosaic.
|
| At the time there were many easy-to-use featureful nntp clients
| across most computing platforms. I remember liking MT-
| Newswatcher quite a bit as well as Nuntius. The UI of
| Newswatcher was not too different from an email client or
| perhaps directory browser.
|
| Screenshots from MT-Newswatcher
| https://smfr.org/mtnw/screenshots.html
| evilbob93 wrote:
| It's arguable that today the "friction" might be a feature.
| jdofaz wrote:
| In the olden times your ISP usually included it like they did
| with email, the instructions for my old isp still exists though
| I doubt the news server does
|
| http://www.uswest.net/help/newsgroups.html
| LinuxBender wrote:
| A paid subscription is not required for the _pure text_ aspect
| of Usenet. [1] It is required however to make use of the binary
| groups which makes sense as those servers use a tremendous
| amount of bandwidth even by today 's standards.
|
| [1] - https://www.eternal-september.org/
| hollerith wrote:
| As someone who's spent many thousands of hours on Usenet (in
| the 1990s), my advice is not to waste your time.
| dmckeon wrote:
| Simple moderation of a newsgroup on Usenet approximated running a
| mail list: known users (like list subscribers) could post
| anything to the newsgroup, while messages from unknown users
| would be diverted into something like a mail spool, and, if
| approved by a moderator, would be posted to the newsgroup. A
| moderator could add or remove users (email addresses) from the
| known users list. Complaints about known user posting behavior
| could be directed to a moderator, who might or might not take
| action. Multiple moderators are possible, see the "STUMP"
| software mentioned in the Reg article.
|
| Attempts to "retro-moderate" previously posted messages by using
| the NNTP cancel mechanism were only widely effective in the very
| early 1980s, and rapidly became problematic due to disagreements,
| forgery, and vandalism.
|
| source: Hosted a moderated newsgroups FAQ for decades, helped
| convert news.newusers.questions to a moderated group - which may
| have been a case of "we had to destroy the village to save it"
| :-(
| [deleted]
| MagaMuffin wrote:
| [dead]
| sargun wrote:
| I never really understood how usenet works. There are usenet
| servers, and you post to usenet via these, right? Given there are
| O(100s) of servers (at least), I assume that the protocol between
| these servers is not full mesh, and there's some kind of small
| set of servers that participate in a mesh, and then followers
| that synchronize from them.
|
| How does this synchronization protocol work? How does one join
| the mesh? I've read the wikipedia article, and it kinda talks to
| the topology and such, but not in great detail.
| floren wrote:
| These days, you join the Usenet by posting in news.peering and
| saying "I want to peer with somebody", or just emailing the
| Eternal September folks: http://www.eternal-
| september.org/index.php?showpage=peering
|
| You configure both configure your servers to exchange messages
| and then... they exchange messages :)
|
| It's good practice to have a couple peers, in case one goes
| offline or doesn't carry the groups you're interested in -- or
| filters things you might want. I run NoCeM on-spool and have
| stricter-than-normal CleanFeed rules, which translated from
| Usenet admin speak means my server drops a lot of spam and
| garbage posts, and if you want those you'll have to get them
| from another peer.
| ogurechny wrote:
| There is no "synchronization" because there is no defined state
| for servers to reach. Protocol simply allows to exchange
| messages in formatted text files between two nodes. What
| happens to them next is not defined (and may vary greatly).
|
| A server might decide to exchange messages in groups A, B, C...
| with peers X, Y, Z. Choice of peers depends on their capacity,
| working hours, geographic location, network position, personal
| connections, access to dedicated lines... Choice of groups
| depends on popularity, space requirements, personal
| preferences, user requests... Some of them allow messages to
| spread step-by-step to all or almost all of the network, those
| are global groups. Some of them are only shared by a couple of
| servers or exist on a single server, those are local. Nothing
| prevents you from making a "boobble.shmoobble.goobble" group
| and stating that it's the central most important point of all
| Usenet. You only need to make all the rest believe it. Then
| there are additional complexities and tools to deal with batch
| transfers, figuring out which messages have not yet been seen
| by a peer since the previous interchange (you don't want X to
| send lots of updates to Z, then Y to take the same long time
| sending mostly the same updates to Z), choice of best next hop
| (routing, manual load balancing), and so on.
|
| Of course, when synchronization is needed -- say, for group
| moderator to be able to delete spam message from many servers
| holding that group instead of each admin doing that on each
| server independently, and to prevent reintroduction and further
| spread of the message, -- it results in hairy ball of hacks on
| top of original architecture, and ad-hoc external trust
| channels, like with signatures. Understandably, Usenet appeared
| in a hierarchical and controlled professional environment
| (users were bound by formal and informal rules), then it was
| re-purposed for free for all operation.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's a manually configured topology. An ordinary server would
| get a feed from somewhere else (probably their upstream ISP). A
| transit server would take dozens of feeds. The operation of
| each of those links is the same, though: `IHAVE <articleid>`
| and `SENDME <articleid>`.
| csixty4 wrote:
| NNTP descends from UUCP, the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol. Used
| to be that some businesses and universities configured their
| Unix machines to call other machines on their modems overnight
| (the rates were cheaper) and synchronize files. Think of it
| like a very slow, ancient version of rsync. You would post on
| your school's Usenet server, which would then sync with one or
| more servers overnight. And eventually (hopefully) your message
| would spread across the whole network. This could take days.
|
| Some of the big timesharing services (think Telenet and Tymnet,
| eventually even AOL) out there ran their own servers, which a
| lot of smaller services dialed into.
|
| How do you join the mesh? You met someone at Usenix or a
| similar conference and said "I'm sitting on a whopping 800mb of
| storage and a T1 line at my university. I'm tired of waiting a
| week to get the new comp.lang.c hotness. Think I could hook up
| to your machine for Usenet?" and they'd be like "Cool! Yeah,
| here's the dialup number. Try to call after 11pm so my boss
| doesn't know about it."
|
| NNTP took this concept of syncing files and made it Internet
| native and specific to Usenet. But the architecture remained
| largely the same.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Used to be that some businesses and universities configured
| their Unix machines to call other machines on their modems
| overnight
|
| I used to work in London, for Olivetti, which was partnered
| with AT&T. Olivetti's office was in Finsbury, just north of
| The City. AT&T were south of the river, near Vauxhall. I
| believe our Usenet feed (and our internet email) was
| couriered-over from Vauxhall on mag tape.
|
| In those days, most ordinary businesses didn't have fixed-
| line internet access, and maintaining a Usenet feed over
| dial-up was expensive, even text-only.
| tptacek wrote:
| I miss Usenet a lot, but the current state of play for
| "newsgroups" (sites like this, and Reddit) is way, way better
| than Usenet was. It's hard to see a real reason to bring it back.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I agree, the alternatives are mostly better...except for the
| interface. I'm not saying that Usenet was great, but damn
| Reddit is such an ugly site. I actually can't bear to look at
| it. Hackernews is pretty nicely designed though.
| tptacek wrote:
| Every web-based message board has a better interface than the
| Usenet newsreaders did, if only because web message boards
| have more affordances for features than newsreaders do.
| rout39574 wrote:
| I disagree. I've never yet seen a forum environment which
| was more usable than GNUS was for me 20-mumble years ago.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think you're taking for granted things like forum
| archive search that are table stakes now, but were space
| alien technology during Peak Usenet.
| h2odragon wrote:
| we just ran `grep` on the news spool directories
|
| Usenet with full access to a big server was fun. With
| just NNTP access, it was diminished. 3 to 6 hops out in
| UUCP/WWIV/FIDOnet land it was a different animal. Still
| of use but high friction.
| tptacek wrote:
| I assume you were taking something less than full feeds,
| because on a full feed reader server, just keeping up
| with the inode demands for all the messages was a
| challenge; grepping would have taken for-fucking-ever.
| h2odragon wrote:
| remember to use `nice` :)
|
| it wouldn't be polite to scan the whole spool, just the
| groups that might bear results.
|
| kibo was an anomaly
|
| i had a shell on a big server for a while; i fed the
| hinterlands with selective feeds.
| queuebert wrote:
| Agree, except with Pine (now Alpine) as the aggregator.
| Very high signal-to-noise ratio.
| jjav wrote:
| > Every web-based message board has a better interface than
| the Usenet newsreaders did
|
| This is a fascinatingly different opinion I can't wrap my
| head around.
|
| To me it seems self-evident that every web-based or
| proprietary app message board interface is immensely worse
| than even the most primitive usenet reader of the 80s.
| andrewjf wrote:
| I'm with you. I really despise web based apps and I
| really loved having a native app experience with usenet.
| Google groups was a UX regression and I really would just
| love to have a native news reader again.
| tptacek wrote:
| When I read comments like this, I assume the person
| writing it didn't spend much time in conversations on
| Usenet. It sucked. Replies would randomly go missing.
| They'd take hours to arrive. Nothing was searchable or
| findable. Replies would expire out in some arbitrary
| amount of time --- every server did this differently.
| There was no meaningful formatting. Because there was
| often no moderation at all, groups would get crudded up
| with spam. There was no sorting of messages; you just had
| to build an intuition for whose responses were worth
| reading, and scan threads for them. Every message had to
| stand alone, like an email, so things were often
| top/bottom quoted, and you had to pick through all the
| chaff to find morsels of new content.
|
| Imagine Hacker News, if instead of Hacker News, you had
| only Gmail's interface and Gmail threading. That's what
| we put up with.
|
| I spent a _lot_ of time on Usenet. I miss it a lot, in
| the same way I miss, like, trip-hop. It was a thing of
| its time. I don 't so much want to engage with it now.
|
| It was great, at the time, because there was nothing else
| like it. But there's no Usenet group I can think of that
| doesn't have a message board equivalent today that blows
| it completely out of the water. I think a lot of people
| are nostalgic for Usenet because they miss the feeling of
| discovering worldwide communities; today, they're a dime
| a dozen.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of
| discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers,
| etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared
| discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to
| Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary
| forums.
|
| I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free
| Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.misc, etc and have fun."
| But I'm a bit leery of encouraging people to do that since I'm
| not sure what the state of spam being sent to the various Usenet
| groups is, or how providers are handling spam filtering (if at
| all).
|
| That said, there's definitely a place for NNTP / Usenet. It might
| take some work to fix up some issues, but it would be great to
| see vibrant / fruitful discussions via Usenet again.
| tptacek wrote:
| The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. Don't
| like the politics? You wouldn't have liked Usenet in its heyday
| either.
| jtode wrote:
| I think you're coating your memory with a thick blanket of
| woke. I was also around in its heyday and the trolls were in
| full effect, and had already learned how to make women's
| lives hell.
|
| There's a newsgroup still extant which is named after a woman
| who spoke up about the CSAM problem on our local university's
| server (I stumbled across it myself once, there was some
| nasty fucking shit going through there). The users of these
| groups did not take kindly to people messing with their
| access to pictures of children being sexually abused. Not
| naming her or the newsgroup because I'm sure she's long since
| gotten it in her rear view mirror.
| omoikane wrote:
| The organization of Fediverse is different, and availability
| of historical discussions is spotty.
|
| Also, some quirky usenet groups aren't available elsewhere,
| such as alt.binaries.*
| tptacek wrote:
| Most Usenet servers had strict retention limits; there was
| no expectation of availability of historical discussions.
| olah_1 wrote:
| ActivityPub servers own your account. This is a non-starter
| for me unless someone holds server admins accountable to laws
| or some kind of liability
| tptacek wrote:
| Just run your own server. The situation was no better with
| NNTP.
| caskstrength wrote:
| > Don't like the politics? You wouldn't have liked Usenet in
| its heyday either.
|
| Or just join an instance that is not explicitly political.
| You don't have to be on beehaw or hachyderm.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Literally perplexed at that statement. That was the only
| place for solid community, damn good information, and endless
| free file downloads in it's heyday. The barriers that made
| people drop it actually make it more attractive these days
| since the masses will never show up.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _The thing you want exists. It 's called the Fediverse._
|
| For the most part, when people talk about "The Fediverse"
| they mean ActivityPub based sites. You could argue the point,
| since NNTP is "federated" as well, and one could certainly
| conceive of federating _between_ the NNTP space and the
| ActivityPub space.
|
| I'm a Fediverse user, fan, and advocate
| (mindcrime@fosstodon.org), but I specifically mentioned
| Usenet, because the "thing I want" in this context is, in
| fact, Usenet. Now if somebody wants to do the work to rebuild
| the Usenet hierarchy on top of the "wild west" that is the
| litany of servers on the Fediverse, build client support into
| Thunderbird, etc., then sure... that could probably turn into
| something interesting.
|
| _You wouldn 't have liked Usenet in its heyday_
|
| Please don't presume to tell me what I would or wouldn't
| like. That's incredibly disrespectful. And in point of fact,
| I _did_ like Usenet in its heyday.
| nikodunk wrote:
| I've been very happy on the Fediverse (mastodon) since I
| took the plunge a few months ago. This is what the "early"
| internet at its best must have felt like. Real humans,
| technical discussions, random finds (painting!), sorted by
| created at desc.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's not really like usenet, if only because of the
| character limits. This really changes the nature of the
| discussion.
|
| Yes, having images available within mastodon is nice -
| that was always clunky with usenet.
| cpach wrote:
| I'm on infosec.exchange, our limit is 11000 chars. That's
| more than enough.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| My understanding is that "typical" Mastodon/ActivityPub
| instances limit you to on the order of 500. Certainly
| true for Fosstodon.
| jowea wrote:
| I never used the Fediverse, but is all/most trying to be
| a Twitter clone?
| cpach wrote:
| Mastodon is like that. Then you have Kbin and Lemmy which
| are more Reddit-like, and Pixelfed which is supposedly
| similar to Instagram.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > sorted by created at desc
|
| Interestingly, this seems to be amongst the most
| controversial aspects; some people _hate_ it.
|
| Personally, I was only quite dimly aware that Twitter had
| an algorithm now, like a common Facebook; until Musk
| ruined it I generally only really used Twitter via
| Tweetbot, so was getting a time-based feed anyway. So
| Mastodon was just what I was used to anyway. But more
| people than I expected actually liked the Twitter
| algorithm, and couldn't cope with Mastodon's lack of
| magic ML stuff at all.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Same. It's a bit "random" though. Maybe because the
| Mastodon world has generally resisted having good global
| search. And even though certain instances have broad
| topics (like sigmoid.social for AI/ML, or fosstodon.org
| for F/OSS) a feed tends to quickly fill up with plenty of
| random stuff.
|
| With Usenet, if you join, say, comp.ai, you know that
| (spam aside) you're just getting AI stuff. Same for
| comp.linux, comp.lang.c++, or whatever. There's something
| to be said for the topic hierarchy there.
|
| I see a place for both ActivityPub and Usenet,
| personally. Although, again, acknowledging that somebody
| _could_ probably in principle build the Usenet style
| experience on top of ActivityPub. But as far as I know,
| that part doesn 't exist today. If it does, somebody
| please let me know.
| vidarh wrote:
| For forums over ActivityPub, there's Lemmy.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's been a while but I don't recall a ton of politics on
| the usenet groups I used to participate in (mostly tech
| subjects). Of course there were groups for politics, and
| sometimes a thread would go off on a tangent, but the nice
| thing about usenet is it was easy to killfile people or
| threads that you didn't want to read anymore.
|
| When I used it it seemed like it was mostly real names
| (.edu accounts) at least on the groups I read, so maybe
| that kept people in check a bit. Though that would have
| been easy to spoof I'm sure.
|
| My department also had some local groups that did not
| propagate. So it must be possible to stand up your own NNTP
| server and have groups for your local users that are at
| least in that sense "private"
| naravara wrote:
| The user was talking about internal group politics/drama.
| Not national electoral politics.
| dmacvicar wrote:
| Usenet was sorted by topic. Same people stick to the
| required topic in different forums.In the fediverse, you
| follow people, and therefore can't control very well what
| people post about. I follow some people because I am
| interested in technical topics, but I end muting some of
| those because some are very political, and I am not
| interested in some of these topics.
|
| I don't think the Usenet model can be replicated on top
| of Fediverse. Not everyone sees instances as a topic
| thing (I host my own instance).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Hm. Wonder if any newsreaders could "follow" a person,
| regardless of the group he posted in. I don't recall that
| feature existing in rn or trn.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Is there a free provider you'd recommend?
| mindcrime wrote:
| No, see above: it's been a while since I looked at the usenet
| landscape. TBH, I'm tempted to set up my own, but I'm not
| sure I have the time/energy/money to deal with the peering
| stuff. But never say never...
| brightsize wrote:
| Eternal September, mentioned in the article, is good. Another
| that I know of is https://solani.org/ .
| pdntspa wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody made fun of you with the typical ageist-
| conformist fashion nonsense that permeates tech discussion
| these days
| reidrac wrote:
| > sign up for a free Usenet provider
|
| Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow
| posting, and free, I think I only know one.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| http://www.eternal-september.org/
| hkt wrote:
| https://sdf.org/?faq?USENET?03
|
| Not free, but a few dollars for ARPA membership for life is
| good.
| reidrac wrote:
| I'm on sdf-eu. Not sure SDF has external groups anymore,
| they may do. Just double check because the website has had
| outdated info before.
|
| AFAIK the best options are https://www.eternal-
| september.org/ and https://usenet.blueworldhosting.com/
| (read only though).
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow
| posting, and free, I think I only know one._
|
| It's been a while since I looked. I could have sworn there
| were at least a handful, but either A. I might be mis-
| remembering or B. the landscape might have changed since I
| checked last.
|
| That said, there seem to be quite few who offer _cheap_ if
| not actually _free_ access. And by "cheap" I mean, on the
| order of $10.00 (USD) / month or less.
| dvdkon wrote:
| I don't think 10USD/month for access to a forum is anywhere
| near cheap or even reasonable, no matter how big it is. I
| can't imagine anyone paying that for non-warez Usenet
| access.
| kxrm wrote:
| That pricing is definitely targeted at users who use
| usenet to trade binary files.
|
| If you do not care about binary files then use
| https://www.eternal-september.org, it's free.
| sigio wrote:
| Get a provider with a block account... 1GB will last
| forever on text-groups, and block accounts usually go for
| 10-1000GB for a few bucks
| fluoridation wrote:
| That seems rather expensive given the service being
| provided, i.e. read-write access to a text-only discussion
| board. Where's all the cost going?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _sign up for a free Usenet provider_
|
| Any suggestions?
| layer8 wrote:
| https://www.eternal-september.org/
| squarefoot wrote:
| Just a warning: Eternal September's administrator doesn't
| give a damn about trolls and spammers posting through that
| server; every single complaint I filed went 100% ignored.
| superkuh wrote:
| The free "10 GB" trial accounts available from usenet
| binaries providers can serve as a text only read/posting
| account for years. Like with usenet.farm
| jtode wrote:
| The spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and
| it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight
| control, which is not a feature of usenet.
|
| One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone
| who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone
| you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of
| keys you decrypt to read.
|
| Aggregators can occupy public keys as their "address" and any
| aggregator that gets obnoxious, you just trim it from your
| list, which only contains things you've either let in or
| accepted via slates or whitelists.
|
| Then the spammers can do whatever they like, really.
|
| I believe the main reason usenet faded so thoroughly was that
| it became a piracy distribution platform very early on (not
| sure which came first, the pirate booty or the porn booty, but
| I'm guessing porn), and very quickly there came a kind of
| unspoken "don't talk about usenet" code among those who already
| knew about it. At the time, Napster and bittorrent were the
| main targets of the authorities and IP trolls and usenet was
| just doing a Jim-From-The-Office-smirking-through-the-blinds.
| SSLy wrote:
| It still does that.
| II2II wrote:
| Didn't a lot of servers just stop carrying the binaries
| newsgroups, or never bothered carrying them in the first
| place? Even without considering piracy, binaries tended to
| place a burden on the server provider since the messages
| tended to be much larger. (Even a small image/program in
| the 10's of kB would be larger than a heavily quoted
| message.
| derefr wrote:
| Yes, and so these days there are paid-subscription NNTP
| providers that sync the alt.binaries groups. Presumably
| all the pirates (both the uploaders, and the pure
| leechers) are using such providers.
| jtode wrote:
| shhhhh
| upofadown wrote:
| >...always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you
| want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of
| keys you decrypt to read.
|
| I think you mean that posters would sign with their private
| keys and you would have a list of public keys that you would
| verify the signature against.
|
| That, incidentally, is also a valid approach to email spam...
| BearhatBeer wrote:
| Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse,
| in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down
| to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon,
| it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own
| Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.
| stewbrew wrote:
| I assume they dropped it because they couldn't monetize it,
| i.e. spam you with personalized ads and the like. Probably
| the same reason why RSS News feeds were dropped.
| skrause wrote:
| In Germany basically all ISPs never provided the binary
| groups, so piracy was never an issue. There also was no
| conspiracy to shut down the servers because of that.
|
| And yet the German groups started a slow but steady decline
| after their peak in 2001: http://usenet.dex.de/de.ALL.html
|
| I was active in the German Usenet back then and still
| remember that between around 2001 and 2005 the spammers and
| trolls took over and destoyed one group after another until
| they were completely unusable. I also mostly quit around
| maybe 2005.
|
| So I highly doubt that Usenet would have continued to work
| if ISPs had just continued support it. Usenet only worked
| as long as everyboy was nice to each other, it would never
| work today without _much_ better moderation protocols and
| tools.
| vidarh wrote:
| It was expensive. I ran an ISP on the mid 90s, and it took
| up an expensive server and a disproportionate amount of my
| time to ensure we had good enough feeds for people to be
| happy, and so the moment demand was dropping it was very
| high on the list of things to get rid of.
|
| Had peering been more on demand, rather than a firehouse,
| maybe people would have kept them longer.
|
| I for a while worked on an aggressively caching NNTP server
| as an option because of the costs involved.
| bsder wrote:
| Yeah, people forget just how expensive both bandwidth and
| storage were in the late 1990s.
|
| YouTube appeared in 2005 and was losing _VAST_ amounts of
| money before Google bought them out. So, even in 2005,
| Usenet probably was still too expensive.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in
| the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and
| most people back then were highly technical and could deal
| with the warts.
|
| Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or
| miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client
| for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for
| people who joined the internet later. They probably never
| even knew it existed.
|
| ISPs became client-less after broadband became widespread.
| ISPs didn't want to write or provide software, they just
| wanted to provide data over basic cable/DSL. Even AOL
| instant messenger eventually faded, as it never really
| adapted itself to a non desktop centric web.
| jtode wrote:
| I've never had an experience as smooth and easy as usenet
| on Free Agent as the gui client. Everything else, forums,
| socials, etc, contain a subset of the features in that
| setup.
| bouvin wrote:
| Gnus was a joy to use. Never has an application fitted me
| better.
|
| Spam was the issue - there were extensions and
| initiatives to combat it, but it was a losing battle. It
| was a major cultural loss - Reddit can at its best
| approach it, but not replace what existed in the early
| nineties.
| BearhatBeer wrote:
| Usenet doesn't have a UX by itself, it's a protocol. The
| user experience is entirely dictated by the software used
| to access it. And Outlook supported Usenet all the way
| from the word go. Macs didn't even come with any email
| clients back in those times, but popular ones supported
| Usenet and there were also Usenet-exclusive programs
| available.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I've been using Outlook since 1997 and this is the first
| time I heard that Outlook supported Usenet. This is what
| I mean, even if it was theoretically supported, it wasn't
| discoverable. If you knew what to connect to and how to
| wire up Outlook, sure, you could get it going.
|
| But let's take something else from the same era and
| provide a comparison for the average user: yahoo.com. You
| typed it into the browser, and you were instantly
| presented with several hundred interesting links. No
| config necessary, just click and go. The UX needed to be
| that simple.
|
| Actually discovering good channels on Usenet took time
| and investment. As opposed to Reddit, for example, which
| used upvotes and decay based algorithms (also, see HN) to
| make fresh subreddits discoverable on the main feed.
| antod wrote:
| I think it was Outlook Express rather than Outlook that
| supported NNTP. The early version of OE was even called
| "Internet Mail and News" or something like that.
| icedchai wrote:
| Today, we could all run our own NNTP servers. The traffic
| on most newsgroups (excluding binaries) would be a trickle
| compared to the average broadband connection.
|
| I ran my own news server in the 90's, receiving about a
| dozen groups over dialup with a UUCP feed.
| sfmike wrote:
| https://easynews.com/
| listenallyall wrote:
| > I believe the main reason usenet faded
|
| I believe it was due to AOL and CompuServe forums, which were
| most importantly, new, novel, friendly and easy. Technical
| people were "above" AOL and so those Usenet communities
| survived a few more years, but ultimately succumbed to web
| forums which were superior to Usenet in almost every way.
|
| Unfortunately, web forums were mostly hollowed out due to
| social media, and now that people are sick and tired of that,
| the simplicity and "innocence" of early 2000's forums, and
| even 90s Usenet, seems appealing (although tinted by rose-
| colored nostalgic glasses).
| jghn wrote:
| Just my opinion but I can't think of a single way in which
| I found web forums of the early 2000s to be superior to
| usenet.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Discoverability? A novice could type something into Web
| Crawler and get a forum back as a search result. Then
| they could click the link and begin reading and
| participating immediately. Was Usenet ever that easy?
| jtode wrote:
| There was a time when "Groups" was section of google
| search and they indexed the whole thing.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Think this is still around (at least the groups are) but
| the interface is terrible. Mailing list-tier
| BearhatBeer wrote:
| Even easier, no web search needed. All you needed to do
| was search the group list for relevant terms. All the
| Usenet clients supported searching the group list. Then
| you just tick the checkbox and the articles were
| downloaded.
|
| Much much easier than using a search engine, scrolling
| through the results which were half ads even in those
| days, and trying out the 12 different forums you finally
| found which were even active...
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > All you needed to do was search the _group list_ for
| relevant terms. All the _Usenet clients_ supported
| searching the group list
|
| - Group list
|
| - Usenet client
|
| Most people had no clue what that stuff was.
| BearhatBeer wrote:
| That's another reason why Usenet was better. There was an
| IQ test to see if you were above 90 just to get going
| with it.
| jghn wrote:
| Exactly. When I got access for the first time in the
| early 90s it took me a few days to wrap my mind around it
| but after that I never had trouble finding groups of
| interest. Tools like search, built in group name
| searches, etc made it easy
| jtode wrote:
| Yah no idea what they talking about me
| listenallyall wrote:
| Your opinion is, of course, valid, but you do recognize
| that it's shared by only a small minority, right?
| jghn wrote:
| Sure, but they made it as a statement of fact. As opposed
| to myself who pointed out it was an opinion.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Don't know about superior but they were definitely an
| evolution of the concept and were more decentralized p
| alexpotato wrote:
| > since I'm not sure what the state of spam being sent to the
| various Usenet groups is
|
| Isn't this why some groups were moderated?
| rjsw wrote:
| I have a few people in my killfile so that I don't see messages
| from them but don't get much spam in the comp.* groups that I
| read.
|
| The threading and only seeing new messages is a lot better in
| my Usenet client than any web forum that I use, including this
| one.
| jjav wrote:
| > The threading and only seeing new messages is a lot better
| in my Usenet client than any web forum that I use, including
| this one.
|
| Indeed! This is the other less-spoken flaw of walled-garden
| communication apps. Since they are proprietary, you're stuck
| with the very limited functionality the company has decided
| to implement (and it's always very limited).
|
| With open protocols such as SMTP and NNTP, there's no limit
| to how feature rich the clients (plural, since there can be
| many clients attuned to different tastes) can be. And you can
| always pipe things to a shell for an infinitely extensible
| set of capabilities.
|
| I find all the proprietary communication apps so frustrating,
| knowing that my email and usenet clients even back in the 80s
| had tons of more functionality and flexibility.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _The threading and only seeing new messages is a lot better
| in my Usenet client than any web forum that I use, including
| this one._
|
| Yep. The Usenet experience is nice. The only thing that
| really got me out of the habit of participating frequently
| was a combination of two factors:
|
| 1. My ISP quit providing NNTP access by default
|
| 2. So many other people moved off, that a lot of the groups
| became nothing but CfP's, spam, and maybe 1 actual
| interesting post per year.
|
| But in the spirit of "be the change you want in the world" I
| guess I'll bit the bullet and sign up for a Usenet account
| somewhere, or stand up my own server and look into what it
| would take to get peering setup.
| tivert wrote:
| > CfP's
|
| What's that stand for?
| hkt wrote:
| Call for Papers I'd guess
| mindcrime wrote:
| Yes, Call for Papers.
| usrusr wrote:
| "Including this one" is a good example, for how the rules of
| how content is selected for presentation define the medium.
| Even with exactly the same people, exactly the same dang
| occasionally nudging people this way or that way, this place
| would be an entirely different if the effective feed
| composition wasn't the one it is. So much of the identity of
| these online communities is an emergent consequence of the
| mechanisms employed.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| i notice that a forum for a productive effort gets much
| less useful if there is a "general" sub form. It seems to
| ruin organization permanently.
|
| One could in stead have a "i don't know where to put this"
| section that forces the mod to move or delete it.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Nostr is the new usenet.
|
| Back to basics with volunteer-relays and zero servers. Carry your
| own texts anywhere without censorship. Share files, share tweets
| (xeets), just share anything with anonymity.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed usenet and IRC. I still enjoy BBS
| today, the only thing that really replaced the 90s feeling of the
| usenet is truly Nostr.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| My impression is that USENET is particularly censorship
| resistant. I suppose that's an advantage-- until someone starts
| to spam it.
| shagie wrote:
| It depends on who's cancel messages you honor.
|
| You'll likely want to honor the anti-spam ones as they're
| deleting spam. Most sites limit the sources of cancel messages
| they honor (and have checks to make sure that its you who are
| deleting your own messages).
|
| Back in the day, censorship was an issue because everyone would
| honor everyone's cancel messages and, well, talking about a
| contentious political topic would likely have people attempting
| to forge cancel messages.
| alexpotato wrote:
| I just recently started reading Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor
| Vinge and it's fascinating that he thought Usenet (or something
| VERY similar) would be how civilizations communicate with each
| other across the galaxy.
|
| (Granted, it was written in the early 90s but feels very apropos
| to see a post about it here on HN)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Given the time lag - even with FTL! - it still seems much more
| reasonable than Star Trek's flawless, synchronous video with
| automatic translation that works flawlessly and is never
| remarked upon (Unless the plot requires it).
| alexpotato wrote:
| Totally!
|
| The parts where the organization is notifying its users:
|
| "Sorry, a giant AI is using all of our bandwidth" reminded me
| of several conversations I've had with networking teams over
| the years.
| mmstr wrote:
| If you want to read more about USENET through a criticism written
| while it was still used, I suggest to you the wonderfully
| anachronistic Unix Haters Handbook
| (https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf), it starts to talk
| about USENET at page 131
| focusedone wrote:
| I'm through the first preface and this looks like a fantastic
| read. Thank you!
| marsa wrote:
| page 131 of the pdf, but page 93 of the book itself in case
| anyone else ends up at the wrong place
| thenose wrote:
| There are a lot of people saying that Usenet is no longer
| appropriate given today's social landscape. But it's interesting
| that Satoshi started Bittorrent by posting to the crypto mailing
| list. That was 2008, a decade and a half ago. But Usenet had died
| long before that, and long after Usenet-style newsgroups had gone
| out of fashion.
|
| Text is timeless, and it's worth keeping an open mind that it can
| work. Maybe specific niche interests are the key; crypto is a big
| topic now, but back then only a few enthusiasts cared.
| h0p3 wrote:
| Toxic (of Toxcore) conferences seem like a great start, in some
| cases.
| bigfryo wrote:
| I first posted on Usenet in 1995.. I am OG
| yaakov34 wrote:
| No, you're not even close.
| paulddraper wrote:
| What is close?
| ksherlock wrote:
| The Henry Spencer utzoo archives go back to February 1981.
| evilbob93 wrote:
| a couple years after AOL came online and... well changed it
| quite a bit.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Sounds like a fun weekend project would be to implement the
| Usenet client/server protocol in your language of choice, and
| maybe start your own federated Usenet server(s).
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I use Usenet with Eternal September, and a NNTP client software I
| wrote by myself. I also have my own NNTP server for discussions
| of my own projects, although currently nobody else uses it than
| myself. (Both my own server software and client software support
| 63-bit article numbers.)
|
| I think that NNTP is better than much of the newer too
| complicated and messy protocols. I also think is better than
| using mailing lists, too. NNTP also you can (like mailing lists,
| but unlike web forums) compose drafts on your computer and read
| messages that have already been downloaded, even if the internet
| connection (or the NNTP server) is currently not working, and
| then you can send/receive once it does work.
| turnsout wrote:
| I was on Usenet a lot up until the late 90s! I just did a quick
| search for Mac Usenet apps, and most of them seem oriented around
| file downloads.
|
| Does anyone have a recommendation for an actually good native Mac
| Usenet app tailored for, like, normal discussion?
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