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?
Usenet was the first time I interacted with the internet as it was the only thing accessible from the Unix lab we had access to (email was available but we didn’t use it). This was 1994. I was on alt.music.pink-floyd during the height of the PUBLIUS ENIGMA puzzle.
I kept using it up into the early 2000s. I’d jump on in the morning before going to work, and that’s how I found out about 9/11 (it was 12:46am NZ time when the first tower was hit). I had gone to our local newsgroup for our city and there were messages in all caps “TOWER COLLAPSED” and then “BOTH TOWERS DOWN”. I wondered what was going on, then turned on the TV where our main channel was feeding in the live news (I think it was CNN). We just sat there horrified, watching before we eventually went off to work.
I eventually stopped using it when web forums and other sites took over for me (fark, slashdot, metafilter) and then my ISP dropped support for it. Google Groups didn’t mesh with me and I never went back.
When I first jumped on here and got my head around federation, it took me back to those Usenet days because in a sense this is almost the same. I’ve seen lots of people say “federation is like email”, but to me it’s like Usenet.
It is a lot like Usenet, but Usenet has some superior features.
Discussion groups are automatically merged across all servers. So it is decentralized but does not feel decentralized.
Newreaders only show you content that you have not already read/seen
Readers let you kill articles in subscribed newsgroups and threads within subscribed newsgroup articles so that you don’t see them in the future.
You are correct but since 99.99% of people do not know what usenet is, it would be a pointless analogy. :) To be more specific than federation being like usenet: usenet was/is federated.
A couple years ago I was telling a 20something about usenet and I started to explain it the same way I always have: “It’s like an email discussion list—” but I was interrupted for a question: “what’s an email discussion list?” And this was a person who would describe themselves as geeky and good with computers. But has had no reason to interact with ancient techs like mailman. So first I had to explain what is an email list, which actually my friend thought sounded like a great idea. But having no experience of it, the ways in which usenet is an improvement were slightly lost.