Comment on What’s Usenet and how can I access it with modern hardware (phones/laptops)?

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adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Usenet has its own protocol (NNTP) where digests of messages get passed from server to server, eventually making it out to all (or most) servers that host a particular group (like alt, sys, gov, etc.). In essence, it’s a federated digital bulletin board of bulletin boards. Many servers don’t participate in some groups such as alt.binary.*.

Usenet pre-dates the world wide web, and even pre-dates Gopher. It was designed such that a Usenet server could spend most of its time disconnected from the Internet and accumulate local posts that would then be federated in a digest when the server dialed up and connected to other servers.

The main NNTP network eventually made its way to a centralized web-accessible service and most places that used to provide an NNTP server (which was most ISPs in the 90s) eventually shut their servers down and only provided gateway and email services.

The protocol still exists though, and there’s still a small connected network.

In reality, Lemmy is the spiritual descendant of Usenet.

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