What is Usenet?
I tried to use Gnus to set up some rss feeds about a year ago, and I became more than frustrated: I was actually confused.
So here are a couple questions I don't even understand where to ask or whether they're relevant or being asked in the right way:
Are most newsgroups mirrored? And along those lines, is there one particular newsgroup server that would be sufficient for most users?
Can I post to a newsgroup in the same way I would post to a mailing list: send an email somewhere? Where do I send that?
What even is NNTP? Someone literally sent me the spec for the protocol, but I don't think they actually wanted to be helpful: I felt like they were putting me down and intentionally not answering while giving the appearance of being helpful. Is it actually something I need to understand to use Gnus effectively?
If you're familiar with newsgroups, I would surely appreciate your knowledge.
More like very few people still use it for the intended purpose. Most people these days use it to post binary data.
ok this is going to sound crazy i think, but i thought using gnus for rss would be pleasant for me, since i hate leaving emacs (i literally wrote this topic in emacs and pasted it in). but it looked like the best support channel for gnus was the gnus newsgroup?!
so i want to use gnus for rss, but be able to get support from their newsgroup, so now i think i need to understand newsgroups.
i have looked at elfeed. i do not like it. i'm not sure i'd like gnus, but i haven't even figured out its core functionality yet, so i'm still open to it.
you mentioned previously
how? do i need an account with some server?
so if i get an account on one of those providers, and they mirror the gnus users group, i can post to the group by sending a message to my provider, and then the other users' providers would mirror the post?
and.... this works? like admins are actually ok just going to other servers, ripping all the content off of it, and rehosting it? it's reliable?
i guess i'm a bit incredulous: it seems like it's a gigantic liability for the server admins, and it also seems like the server admins could be capricious and just stop users from participating in a group (even if it were for a good reason).
thank you. i feel like i understand what's going on (a little better, anyway)
I think of usenet as similar to an old listserv --- mailing lists where you join the list, and you recieve email from everyone else on the list. If you send an email, everyone else on the list gets a copy.
If you send a binary (attachment) to the email list, it is converted into an asci/text form using an encoding system like uuencode --- the binary data is converted to large blocks of simple text, then sent just as plaintext in the body of the email. The receiving mail client converts it back into a binary attachment and displays it as such. It's a pretty baroque and magical system that just-works well enough that many/most people have never really been aware that SMTP email is (was) technically plaintext-only. No fonts, colors, formatting or attachments.
NNTP is very, very similar, even using uuencode for binaries. The difference is that instead of being addressed to particular users/people via an email address like name@domain.com, these (often giant) text messages are organized into things like macos.comp.sci
The messages are copied from NNTP server to NNTP server as peers, so something you post into a newsgroup will be copied to your server's peers, and those peers copy it to their peers etc. Messages 'ripple' across USENET in this fashion, and in the early days every NNTP server would carry/copy/forward all newsgroups.
Nowadays of course there could be all sorts of risky stuff in there, and most NNTP only carry a selection.
AND yet still, most of usenet now is large pirate binaries, used as a file-sharing system that is technically very different from bittorrent, but functionally somewhat similar.
I can't speak to the earliest days, but even as far back as the late 90s, the significant majority of Usenet content was porn and warez
Certainly that's true in terms of volume --- any binaries are going to be massively huge compared to human-readable text.
Usenet isn't mirrored, but what today we call "federated" - think of it like Mastodon or Lemmy. Many servers, one Usenet. Everyone shares their content with everyone else; it's how Usenet is supposed to work.
thank you. it still seems risky to be blindly mirroring other sites with usergenerated content, whether we call it mirroring or federation.
The mailing list analogy is a good one. And the person sending you the spec for NNTP wasn’t helping - it’s the protocol used to sync news between usenet servers. They should have sent you NNRP instead :)
Pithiness aside, gone are the days when most isps run a local usenet server for their customers. The volume of data is enormous, the vast majority of it is illegal, and almost nobody uses it anymore.
When you are running NNTP services, you can choose which groups to mirror, how long to keep posts for and a zillion other items, so you don’t have to take all of the porn, movies and software, but you are still mirroring loads of user generated content.
To get back to the question at hand though, find a premium usenet service with a free trial, make sure they carry the newsgroup you are looking for, and you should be able to configure an NNRP client to read it. One you connect to the group, you will be able to see all messages that server has to the group for the retention period of the server in question.
I hope that makes sense?