55
votes
USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix
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- Title
- USENET, the original social network, is under new management
- Published
- Aug 30 2023
- Word count
- 552 words
I miss Usenet as a discussion forum. I used it for decades, but the spam won in the end. There was no point trying to interact in a group when 99% of the topics and replies were spam.
I seem to recall buying a Usenet client back in the Windows 3.1 days... Did Netscape have a paid version back in the day? Access to Usenet was via a local university internet provider which provided some limited groups and very low retention.
Still been using Usenet for binaries, but I'd love to see text return. The OG forum, where content was the important component not the pictures, and federation was already a thing.
I seemed to vaguely recall that the free and paid versions were pretty much identical with people either getting it free directly from Netscape via FTP or buying it on disk in a store. I was able to confirm my memories via the Netscape Navigator Wikipedia page:
I kinda wonder if Netscape would still be a household name in tech if they had monetized things a little more aggressively.
One of the most popular Windows UseNet clients was Forte Agent (which had a free version back then called Free Agent) - it's still being updated and sold today!
As someone that uses text usenet from time-to-time, there is a very slow amount of growth in the network and folks are starting to talk on there again. The problem is:
There are a lot of newsgroups out there from when Usenet was popular and so there's no good way to find community.
Most of the people on Usenet are... tech people. I'm tired of only talking with other tech people on the net and I'd love to open Usenet up to a less technically savvy bunch (and I've been thinking about this for a while now and have even considered trying to build a more modern client.) The existing clients are all pretty bad. Pan is a decent newsreader but it's still so much harder to get started with than a modern social network that I don't even feel comfortable recommending it to too many people.
Usenet still has some of the old-school cranks who do nothing (cough Adam Kerman cough) but tell you how your posts are not following netiquette. It also has some of the old kooks who probably need their medication but continue to post... unhinged things. You can plonk (put them in your killfile) the kooks, but when they get other people to respond, you still see huge flamewars that you have to manually plonk.
The NNTP protocol used to interact with Usenet is very old-school. This is obviously just an implementation detail, but its semantics are much closer to FTP than modern stateless semantics which makes it more painful to develop new clients.
Overall I'd love to talk with more folks on Usenet and it's truly an example of internet infrastructure that's very hard to kill. But I just don't see it getting particularly popular again any time soon. UX standards of net and web users have just gotten high enough that without some serious client work, Usenet won't be usable (pun intended) any time soon.
Thanks for this reply - I’ve thought about hopping back to Usenet from time to time but haven’t gotten around to it. I wouldn’t mind using pan or slrn or something again but I forgot some of the other difficulties that you mentioned, particularly the old cranks, shouting about top posting or bottom posting or god knows what.
One other thing I realized - I have no idea where to find an nntp server anymore. My old school ISP used to have one of course. And then I used Zippo for a long time until they became whatever it was after Zippo. But searching for providers now, it’s really just a list of who has the best binary retention and number of concurrent sessions available and doesn’t keep log files!
www.eternal-september.org
Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
The only news in this article is "The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network." but it never elaborates on this point in favour of selling what usenet is. I also find it odd that they repeat this line, " Although the original developers closed down their instance in 2010, that was just one server out of hundreds." Just feels like a low effort article.
Having a quick look, I can't see anywhere, what the committee is reconvening about, or why there are "green shoots".
AI probably wrote it.
I don't think it was written by AI, but the author sure seems to repeat themselves a lot.
Classic sign of AI though. I'm able to spot sales descriptions created by AI because they all sound the same.
Pretty sure the only thing USENET is good for nowadays is piracy, lots of good content there if you know where to look and much safer than torrents depending on where you are. Other than that, I don't know why you'd ever want to go there, it's dead. Simple as that.
Spam research!
I work with a guy who gets pretty much all his movies through USENET still.
I'd love to peek under the hood, but it feels like one of those molten ant colonies. Six feet deep and hundreds f rooms I'll never see
I still use comp.os.linux.misc when I have a linux problem I could not get help with anywhere else.
Some extremely knowledgeable people there willing to give lots of help.
A few with some scary political views though.
I tried getting back into USENET a few months ago, looking for a jazz newsgroup. I only found one, and it was completely dead apart from spam 😔
It would be nice to have a guide of how to use Usenet because it's always been surrounded by a difficult learning curve and paid servers. Both impact it's reach, and I wonder if the Usenet community likes it that way too.