So I’ve finally been doing my little reddit/twitter migration against my better judgement (my better judgement would say to take the opportunity to get off the internet but who listens to that loser). I’m finding all these platforms interesting, I particularly like how kbin combines both formats and links up to Mastodon, that’s quite an idea.
Having said that all this nonsense made me nostalgic for Usenet all over again. I had some very enjoyable years on there and quite a lot of what I liked about Reddit was actually that it felt like the closest thing the web had to Usenet. (You’d think Google Groups was the closest thing but for some reason it wasn’t. There is something I just loved about a newsreader’s interface that Google Groups didn’t replicate and it was just annoying).
It actually made me go check some old newsgroups out, and, well, that’s the eternal problem Usenet isn’t it - it being 99% dead as a parrot.
Is anybody still on Usenet, and if so what newsgroups do you follow? For that matter, what newsgroups are you aware of as still having some activity? Is anybody interested in getting (back) on it, and if so on where? Is Google Groups still in 2023 the best the web has to offer in terms of accessing it easily?
This is not true at all. People download phone clients all the time. And there were also Usenet web clients. Subscribing to newsgroups is exactly the same as subscribing to subreddets or kbin magazines. And you have to pick a server for Fedverse also, but the the Usenet server doesn’t matter at all like a Fedverse server does.
The only reason people don’t use Usenet is because the free servers disappeared and ISPs no longer provided it with your internet service.
this is totally not the case. your usenet server mattered a lot and some people would even pay to subscribe to servers in addition to what was provided by their ISP to access all the content they were interested in.
usenet was a federated forum where messages were exchanged between servers with relationships with each other. Sometimes there would be no server connection between you and another user. So you would see replies directed at a person but you would never see their posts directly. The situation could be mutual, or not. Some servers would send messages to anyone who asked but only pick up from their chosen sources. IME the more physically remote someone was, the more likely there would be hiccups in communication.
also servers would pick and choose what groups they would even pick up. it was a whole thing.
On usenet there was no one central “truth” or baseline. Everyone was always working with pieces.