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Comment by achillean | Hacker News Reader

FYI there are still more than 8,000 NNTP servers on the Internet:

https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=200+nntp

That seems like a lot. I really wanted NNTP to work. My small town have two Facebook groups, one for general information, and one for selling stuff. I really want information like that to be available on NNTP instead, but convincing people to drop Facebook and use a technology they've never heard of isn't going to happen.

Last time I tried jumping on to a few newsgroups it was like walking into an abandoned city. The last posts on once active groups are years old, not counting the random spammer.

If anyone is a member of a cool Newsgroup, reply with it, I'm interested to try such a community.

https://www.grc.com/discussions.htm

It's not very active (and I'm not active there either), but tildeverse has its own NNTP server. https://news.tildeverse.org/

Some programming languages have them. I'm personally subscribed to Dlang (news.digitalmars.com), Perl (nntp.perl.org), and PHP (news.php.net). All of them have decent traffic every day, although most of that is likely due to the mailing list that they mirror. You can also post to the mailing lists from NNTP on all of those AFAIK.

By the way, I think it's absolutely amazing that one can access the same discussion over several protocols (NNTP, email mailing list, and often HTTP) without losing any functionality.

> By the way, I think it's absolutely amazing that one can access the same discussion over several protocols (NNTP, email mailing list, and often HTTP) without losing any functionality.

By using HTTP I lose a lot of features! I can't filter (both for removal as well as for highlighting) as I need (i.e.ignore some flame war threads or highlight messages to me), I can't work offline (while there are less situation where that is needed, but can still be useful when loading on the side and then having low latency while looking through messages) etc.

However mail and nntp never really got the spam problem solved and development of "nice" clients basically stalled last 15 or so years.

>> By the way, I think it's absolutely amazing that one can access the same discussion over several protocols (NNTP, email mailing list, and often HTTP) without losing any functionality.

SynchroNet today has crazy multiprotocol support.

comp.unix.programmer Unix programming, mostly C AND Unix related.

comp.unix.shell Unix utils, awk, shell scripting.

comp.lang.c C programming help

comp.lang.c.moderated Ditto, but with less nuts

alt.os.linux.slackware Slackware users.

rec.arts.int-fiction (text adventure game creating)

rec.games.int-fiction (text adventure game announces/discussions)

rec.games.roguelike.nethack Nethack (and Slashem by extension).

I think most of them are used for piracy.

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