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m463

is usenet still alive?

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Eternal September, a popular nntp server, has some statistics on posting done through their server.

http://www.eternal-september.org/postingstats.php

The top 5 newsgroups for May 2023:

it.politica, fr.misc.actualite.covid19, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, it.hobby.fai-da-te, uk.d-i-y

I'm not sure what to make of that (aside from the large Italian/French contingent) but the top 10 includes some normal fare like rec.food.cooking, rec.arts.tv, and rec.bicycles.tech

Is HN available (e.g. "comp.culture.hn") on USENET? It would be nice to have the Web forum be interoperable with a USENET group.

The pull model (consume based on your topic/activity) of USENET newsgroups fits forum discussions much better than the "visit all pages you care about daily" Web model, IMHO.

The usenet model also is much better for reading because it tracks what you have already read. If I come to this article tomorrow I'll see all the comments from today that I already read, and someplace mixed in there are new comments that came after I finished reading. Some of those comments are very insightful, but no web forum I've seen has any concept of "you already read this so we will make it easy to skip that by default".

Technically USENET doesn't have that concept either, but all the software I have ever used to read it does, and that is what counts. (unfortunately all the software is local only so I can't switch between my phone and my desktop for reading - then again I haven't looked at USENET in 25 years so I don't know what is current)

It's sad that the threaded reading capabilities of most computer-mediated communications systems are actually worse nowadays than they were in the heydays of Netscape Communicator and trn.

The best solution there would be using some sort of web based hosted solution, which may well not exist. Thinking something like how TT-RSS replaced Google Reader. Basically, self hosted Google Groups, back when Google Groups was synonymous with web based usenet.

Shouldn't be too crazy to cobble together, if it doesn't already exist -- just an nntp client on top of a lamp stack.

There is a hacker news API so somebody could set up an NNTP server with an HN newsgroup. Looks like it's already been done, at least for personal use. If a newsgroup is read-only and only on one NNTP server, does it count as usenet? Is that like the sound of one hand clapping?

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

https://www.npmjs.com/package/hackernews2nntp

https://github.com/gromnitsky/hackernews2nntp

Honorable mention for gwene.org which converts RSS feeds into NNTP and gmane.org that converts mailing lists into NNTP.

Yes it is, but only barely. Most of the posters are quite old and in a lot of groups when someone doesn't respond for a while, people become concerned for their health.

Private usenet is a much better model for corporate discussion than eg Slack and typical alternatives. More natural message threading, integration with email clients, binary and document handling built in. Not sure about search but easily done on client side.

Private nntp servers never seemed to be a thing though.

Yes. Many groups are pretty much dead, but there are some that are active (a handful that are QUITE active). The quality of the active groups ranges from "60% flames" to "these are Ph. D's talking to each other about things I will never understand". Though most, of course, are somewhere in-between.

Compare this to Reddit however you like.

Can you name a few I've been using usenet for over 4 years now with other pruporses but would love to delve into newsgroups.

Live: rec.arts.sf.written -- discussion of written science fiction and fantasy

Nearly dead, but if you post cogently, someone will respond: rec.audio.high-end -- discussion of high-quality (not necessarily high cost) audio reproduction

Sure!

alt.arts.poetry.comments

alt.bbs.synchronet

alt.comp.software.firefox

alt.fan.usenet

alt.folklore.computers

alt.os.linux.debian

alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst (This is somewhat low-traffic but is unique; people write in the third person imagining themselves stepping into a friendly coffeehouse)

comp.infosystems.gopher

comp.os.linux.misc

comp.os.linux.networking

comp.risks (moderated)

comp.sys.raspberry-pi

comp.unix.shell

gnu.emacs.help

rec.food.cooking (eh, 60% flames, 40% interesting)

rec.music.classical.recordings (surprisingly active)

> comp.infosystems.gopher

LOL. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the overlap in interests. You like one old fossil of a communication system you will probably like more.

Also:

rec.arts.int-fiction

rec.games.int-fiction

rec.games.roguelike.nethack

Surprised to see alt.arts.poetry.comments on this list. Yes it remains active, but the regular posters there[1] are for the most part the remnants who triggered the Great Poet Flight to various online (moderated) forum venues 20 years ago.

Some of those troll fights were fun. Some even involved poetry.

Also: obligatory link to the Usenet Poetry Groups "Rogues Gallery" that I created prior to the Great Poet Flight: http://www.rikweb.co.uk/photos/rogues-gallery.html

[1] - https://groups.google.com/g/alt.arts.poetry.comments

I follow comp.os.vms and sci.electronics.design is always hot. I think there's probably a lot of little corners of usenet which are still pretty active. I was sad to see comp.dsp die off, but it's been equally more active by the same people on stackexchange.

It's incredibly alive thanks to piracy. Look at r/usenet for a peek of what people are doing with it nowadays. There are numerous sites which index binaries on Usenet, many use obfuscation to avoid DMCA/NTDs.

Obfuscation and quasi uncrackable passwords usually. The big problem being that when a .rar file goes missing (and not enough parity files were used), the download is dead forever but is hard to flag as such.

That's the tunnel to Usenet. We don't go there anymore.

I tried setting up one of the open source servers and it was an awful experience. I dug around and it seems like most providers are using proprietary implementations or proprietary forks of servers that are no longer maintained. I was interested at the time in understanding how the big guys like Giganews and so on set up nntp, peering, storage, etc. Didn't get very far.

Funny none mentions piracy. I love being on hacker news but I don't understand 98% of the lingo haha.

These servers don't carry the "binaries" groups. They carry the discussion groups, so there should be no piracy going on there.

Also, games grew well beyond what would be reasonable to send over Usenet. There was really only a time in the late 90s when games were small enough to not require you split them into literally millions of parts. This happened to coincide with the maximum popularity of the Usenet, but as a distribution platform today it's just not practical. Still useful for music albums and DVD movies I guess, but as the parent post pointed out nobody carries alt.binaries anymore. The pirates have long since moved on.

Porn was also a big thing in the binaries groups back in the day, specifically photos.

And at Belgacom Skynet we had people dedicated to the task of finding the illegal photos and purging them from our systems. I sat next to Thierry who was doing a lot of that work. Poor guy.

I caught only glimpses of some of the stuff he had to witness, and I would not wish that job on my worst enemy.

There are plenty of full-size games and UHD movies being distributed over alt.binaries. Pirates pay to use newsservers that carry the massive alt.binaries.

I tried using it again after the Twitter thing, and oh boy, forget it. Alive yes, 12 headed dragons, yes. It's the mad max realm of the internet.

I really wish it wasn't and that new standards would be on top and clear it up.

Really needs a code of conduct...

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