26
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Does anyone here use Usenet as an actual news reader anymore?
And I mean besides pirating.
If so, what kind of communities/servers are you a part of and could you recommend any public, general Usenet servers for newbies to check out?
...i've tried two or three times this century but the signal-to-noise ratio was untenable, overrun by bots with negligible real traffic left in their wake...the closest it came to usability were a few hyper-specific local groups shortly after the turn of the millenium, but even those had washed-out last i checked a few years ago...
edit: ...just sorted through my newsfeed and the only group with active traffic this year was rec.arts.sf.written...
double-edit: ...just realised that i never answered your second question: i use eternal-september.org, but i also hear good things about solani.org if you're looking for a newsserver...
My experience was exactly the same. plus the amount of unhinged people in the somewhat active groups really made any discussion difficult.
...i'd even go so far as to confess a perverse archaeological-forbidden-knowledge buzz when i stumble upon the vaguely-coherent ramblings of mentally-unstable folks who've stubbornly endured usenet's decades of neglect, talking to an empty roomful of bots and algorithms...
...it's not necessarily pleasant, but it's oddly fascinating, kind of like replying to a decades-old thread as though the conversation never missed a beat...
This sounds fascinating enough to poke into. I'm not surprised but was hopeful it'd be something like IRC, where there are still some active and moderated servers and channels you can join and participate in. Oh well.
As far as I know, USENET died a good decade ago if not more. The slow death spiral started when Google Groups and Deja News combined.
Practically zero ISPs carry news any more, if they do it's just one greybeard inside the organisation pushing to keep an ancient server running.
If you try to find a 3rd party news server, it's purely warez focused. Who else would need "extremely long binary retention" and "unlimited bandwidth" and "free VPN connections" for a text-based forum?
I stopped using Usenet for text in about 2004.
It might be possible for an organisation to provide private, whitelisted, strongly moderated, Usenet servers. But that means you get a lot of the disadvantages of Usenet without most of the benefits.
I haven't used USENET in a long, long time but am very curious if folks still do.
Hopefully some folks who are currently active in USENET will appear
I never used it for pirating. :-)
If I have a Linux problem that I have not been able to get help with by other means I post the question to comp.os.linux via Google Groups. That happens about twice a year.
Yes, with Gnus. My hobbyist ISP still runs a server. Most relevant action to me happens on Gmane tho, which also can be read over NNTP.
The Ascii and also recipes groups were handy. Been a few years since I last used Usenet though
comp.arch is fairly active and high quality
comp.databases.theory was formerly overrun by a crank—alas, he seems to have given up last year
Other newsgroups are fairly inactive, but do see some use, and I check in on them from time to time.
There was only one usenet group I ever read with any degree of interest, and that was soc.motss, which I was interested in for mostly historical reasons.
It wasn't a great forum, but I found it interesting at the time. There was one person in particular who was active in pretty much every conversation who was a hardcore christian who hated themself for being gay. The moderated newsgroups weren't quite the cesspits that the unmoderated ones were, but they were all very sad places to be.