It is ironical that we talk about usenet everywhere but on usenet. Events like the blackout on reddit and the scramble to move to alternate platforms would hardly be necessary if usenet worked clearly as a discussion platform.
While everyone blames spam for the slow death of discussions on usenet, I think there are a couple of other reasons:
- access over http
- searchability
These two reasons are why Google Groups continues to work while discussions on usenet barely do.
Usenet has to evolve to provide solutions to these problems:
- spam: moderated groups are an insufficient solution when compared to moderation tools provided by modern discussion platforms.
- usenet over http: people should be able to carry on discussions using browsers as well as apps. They should be able to share links to these discussions as well.
- search: people should be able to conduct a search across all discussions by using native as well as third-party search engines (Google, Bing, Brave etc).
Inwas under the impression that we had USENET access via our newsreaders on SDF, I even tried reading it a bit but it seemed like a ghost town… but someone told me it’s not actually connected to the wider usenet so it would just be for SDF (which would explain the emptiness.) Was I misinformed?
I don’t know the details. My guess, based on the FAQ, is the
sdf.*hierarchy would be accessible internally while the public newsgroups (comp.*etc) would be dealt with in the regular manner.It seems the sdf hierarchy is not carried by the Usenet provider. I checked on Newshosting and Newsgroupdirect.
It might be a local newsgroup.