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 arose during a time when the people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them. Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
If it’s not on a touchscreen, and not able to be done with 2 or 3 taps, then it ain’t happening.
Expanding on this, I’m worried a technological education gap is forming among the youth. Old people didnt grow up with computers, they have an excuse. Middle aged people had to deal with the computers of the 80s and 90s, and because of that, understand computing pretty well. Young people were born into a world of instant gratification and super simplified touchscreen GUI interfaces, and from talking with them, it’s clear most of them know how to get on the internet and do their thing on social media, but most of them have no clue how the nuts and bolts of it all work.
Usenet arose during a time when the people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them.
Well. Usenet arose during a time when computers were only available to people who were all or most of the following: wealthy, white, formally educated at the post secondary level, professionally employed, affiliated with a western university, fluent in English, male, associated with the “defense” industry. Presumably most people who were on Usenet in 1980 had a good understanding of the technology.
But you sound as though you are being nostalgic for this extremely exclusionary time in computing. Having been in rooms as described above, it is not as interesting as you’d think. Homogeneous. Rigid. Boooring.
Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
Why would anyone do that in 2023 when usenet is full of spam. It would only be an academic exercise unless you are looking to download pirated content. In which case usenet is quite a popular choice. Usenet’s traffic has increased steadily year over year as it has transitioned into a media sharing platform. But you mean the forum side of things. Probably because you yourself have “sadly” not done any of the things you are crying about other people not doing you are not even sure what is going on.
Expanding on this, I’m worried a technological education gap is forming among the youth.
It’s off topic but on this you are correct from what I understand. I can’t find in my bookmarks right now but I recall having read some research about how younger people (b >~2000) lack understandings of things like file systems and other computer basics. In their experience these things have always been very obscured. So they are very good at the things they have experience with, but actual understanding of “computers” is minimal.
Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
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.
the the Usenet server doesn’t matter at all like a Fedverse server does.
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.
Yes. plenty of articles coming out about how many in gen z are technology illiterate. I am started to see it at my workplace since we hire a lot of fresh college grads. getting more support calls for completely inane stuff that shows the person has zero basic technological knowledge, like the type of stuff that my you see from boomers. and often it’s the issue is simple the user doing things wrong and refusing to understand or learn to do them correctly, like a boomer.
it’s wild to think a 22yo is incompetent at basic computer skills, but like you said, all they do is social media crap on their phones. they have no idea how to actually work with PC/Mac applications, let alone solve basic problems or change settings.
This is why I try to involve my 5 year old god daughter in whatever tech project I’m working on whenever she’s over. I also have a bunch of edutainment games running on my Windows 98 PC that she plays. She knows how to use a keyboard and mouse, which puts her well ahead of her peers from what I understand.
I’ve only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands “minecraft” to be an adjective meaning “that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic”, it’s adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.
Maybe it’s time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age
Ah yes, Usenet was the original Fediverse. Kind of. It was more of a distributed peer-to-peer system than the current day ActivityPub. I loved it back when it was mainly discussion and the .binaries groups were an awkward sideshow. Reddit filled that niche in terms of its actual function, but I always knew the underlying centralized structure of Reddit would someday be its downfall.
The sad thing is that back when it first began Reddit was actually planning on being federated too. They released their server as open source and had plans to make it able to interact with other Reddit servers. Never came to fruition.
They even paid someone to design a semi-monetary points system and then scrapped it…
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.
I’ve seen lots of people say “federation is like email”, but to me it’s like Usenet.
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.
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.
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Discussion groups are automatically merged across all servers. So it is decentralized but does not feel decentralized.
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Newreaders only show you content that you have not already read/seen
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Readers let you kill articles in subscribed newsgroups and threads within subscribed newsgroup articles so that you don’t see them in the future.
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