Submitted 1 year ago by ZeroCool@feddit.ch to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/30/usenet_revival/
I’m all for getting into old school tech, I even like to browse neocities.org on occasion just for the hit of nostalgia for the old web rings. I never got into newsgroups though, and I’m wondering what reasons you might use that instead of something like Lemmy, Mastodon etc?
Apart from the piracy side, I know all about that already lol
Because all the oldheads are there and they have a wealth of arcane and also useful knowledge you can’t find anywhere else
Cool, I just installed Thunderbird and am giving it a go.
Because although there are a lot of usenet clients, there is no Sync for usenet
Hey also. Gopher is also getting a bit of a hit, but mostly due to a new protocol someone came up with called Gemini. It's like Gopher a lot but has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
You can find out more about it here. I recommend Lagrange for your client. Two places I like to go to are Station (gemini://station.martinrue.com/) and Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/). BBS (gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) is also a new one on the scene.
And the nice thing about Lagrange is that it also supports the Finger protocol which basically is a way to read the .project or .plan file on a given user for the indicated system. Those files for those that never used them allowed a user to type a short status update into them that folks could then poll at any given time. Basically "ye olde status update".
There's a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/) and it works really well in Lagrange.
the .plan file in a user’s home directory is displayed when the user is fingered
Heh.
Gopher lost out to WWW in part because Gopher was proprietary. The University of Michigan owned the code and proposed to charge server owners for using it. Meanwhile Sir Tim over at CERN was handing out the original httpd under an MIT-style license.
[Gemini] has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
"Markup" would be a better term here. Markdown is a specific markup language which Gemini doesn't use.
See this? These are the comments I live for. You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
There’s a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no)…
That’s neat! Thanks!
Funnily enough I was toying with the idea of making a Gopher based Lemmy frontend for the lulz. Maybe Gemini then?
What’s the cool thing to do there?
Wow thanks for this comment, Lagrange works incredibly well. I had a lot of fun trying out Gemini, I had been doing Gopher recently but Im definitely going to add this to my goofing around.
The fact that usenet has still hung on all this time as more than just a place for people to share pirated files is honestly impressive, and also is a pretty decent endorsement. Unfortunately it has a fair number of weaknesses, especially in terms of moderation tools and access these days, but ultimately a lot of what people want in a social media platform can be found on usenet. An effort to update it for modern sensibilities might actually create something pretty cool.
Lack of censorship tools is a strength.
Clearly you aren’t old enough to remember why Usenet faded away in the first place. It was the first platform to drown in an endless torrent of spam and low quality posts
"The truth is you love censorship, and so does everyone else. The only question is whether you’re ready to admit it."
Is there a “usenet for dummies” guide somewhere, for 90s kids?
Asking for a friend.
It’s quite easy, but you’ll need an account and a client.
Ask me if you have a question!
Certainly. You should ask your favorite search engine.
It’s not that easy, because the vast majority of articles are for using Usenet to download binaries. It’s not what the article was talking about.
Maybe it’s time to dig out and polish my NNTP client that I’ve written 30 years ago.
Are you one of the wizards of yore? The ones who were there when the old magic was written?
In a way. Gobelin was my NNTP client, and Connector was my client for multiplayer games. I did some more work back then, like writing our companies’ SMPT gateway. Ah, those were the days…
Now that’s a 4 letter acronym I haven’t seen for a while.
And it still works.
Isn’t like 90% of the traffic on Usenet from alt.bin.*? In other words, file sharing. I’ve looked around some newsgroups, and most of them are just filled with spam posts
I mean with Streaming Services cutting down the Password-Sharing so that you need to pay multiple expensive services to get access and it’s not convenient anymore with having to switch between them to find something to watch I’m not surprised that a piracy-heavy social network is thriving…
I remember ICQ
Uh oh!
I hear those words.
30250969 was my user id.
When I try to remember mine I get confused with my SSN.
My ICQ UIN is only 7 digits
My sweet memory of an instant messenger not trying to fuck with you (lots of incoming messages were, though, but those were sometimes real people ; I actually know of people who met each other via ICQ contact directory and have a happy marriage ; don’t think anything else has come close).
Other than that, it was just a better time. WCIII, Perfect World, WoW, Travian. Forum-based text roleplaying games (LOTR and HP). And ICQ as the way people would communicate, which would transcend interests fading, forums dying etc.
Pre-MS Skype was nice too, though.
OG Travian was the shit. I made a lot of friends there that persisted long after I left the game.
I tried to recover an ancient icq account but it looks like the company sold and nuked all the old accounts. Bummer, was hoping all my mid 90s friends might still be there.
Also changed protocol. Old UINs were, I think, usable for some time.
I kinda want to do this and also go back to IRC. Some of my happier moments and interesting conversations were on IRC. My best friend who eventually became my husband was met on IRC. Good times.
So many good memories on IRC. I miss it so much. Discord just isn’t the same.
IRC still exists. You can just like… do it.
No offense to the fediverse, but I think usenet was first
That’s what the title of the post says.
To be fair it calls usenet the original gangster
Stupid question of the day does this compete with the fediverse or it goes along it?
It’s the fediverse’s great great grandpa.
It’s not a competitor, no.
Federation of usenet required either a peering link or scripting to pull down all new articles, it ain’t automatically like here.
Yeah that was its downfall really… anyone could run a server, but getting actual stuff onto it, and getting your posts recognised, required peering, which required being on someone’s good side.
Binary groups becoming piracy hubs didn’t help either… it meant most of the small groups that ran servers gave up as the data requirements got too large.
We may yet be able to take back the internet. I’ve also seen people use IRC again/still. For actually other things than botnets.
Seems like the committee is only like 3 people, so who knows how that’ll go. It’s no different then any other open-source ecosystem out there now, it needs to compete with them and gain developers and usable applications. It’ll be an entirely new framework from scratch, so why would people pick their product over others? The only thing that remains original is the USENET brand.
It’s still alive and kicking under the old framework though. Most ISPs dropped their news servers ages ago but there are still loads of free and subscription providers out there.
I don’t know what this committee thinks it can accomplish that the fediverse hasn’t already picked up the torch on, but power to them. The less centralized and more diverse the Internet is, the better.
I still think a Usenet like service would be brilliant and it’s a shame there isn’t a Lemmy-like service that has that.
To clarify, what I mean is decentralised infrastructure (you go onto the news server you want) with shared content (ie the same was that every Usenet post ends up on every Usenet server, if that server carries that newsgroup) - it gives all the advantages of federalisation (don’t like your server, just go to another, you lose little or nothing) without the disadvantages of unintuitive discovery and fragmentation.
They still have centralization in way though, as in the Big-8 has moderation powers regardless of what server is hosting. Though a server can probably patch that out.
It’s not text only if you have UUDecode.
I wonder if Sea Wasp is still posting on rasfw…
alt.binaries.lossless err ftw :)
lanbanger@kbin.social 1 year ago
My first ever internet contribution was a post to "alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die"
dutchkimble@lemy.lol 1 year ago
Hah!