USENET rises again?
theregister.com
theregister.com
I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.misc, etc and have fun." But I'm a bit leery of encouraging people to do that since I'm not sure what the state of spam being sent to the various Usenet groups is, or how providers are handling spam filtering (if at all).
That said, there's definitely a place for NNTP / Usenet. It might take some work to fix up some issues, but it would be great to see vibrant / fruitful discussions via Usenet again.
For the most part, when people talk about "The Fediverse" they mean ActivityPub based sites. You could argue the point, since NNTP is "federated" as well, and one could certainly conceive of federating between the NNTP space and the ActivityPub space.
I'm a Fediverse user, fan, and advocate (mindcrime@fosstodon.org), but I specifically mentioned Usenet, because the "thing I want" in this context is, in fact, Usenet. Now if somebody wants to do the work to rebuild the Usenet hierarchy on top of the "wild west" that is the litany of servers on the Fediverse, build client support into Thunderbird, etc., then sure... that could probably turn into something interesting.
You wouldn't have liked Usenet in its heyday
Please don't presume to tell me what I would or wouldn't like. That's incredibly disrespectful. And in point of fact, I did like Usenet in its heyday.
Interestingly, this seems to be amongst the most controversial aspects; some people _hate_ it.
Personally, I was only quite dimly aware that Twitter had an algorithm now, like a common Facebook; until Musk ruined it I generally only really used Twitter via Tweetbot, so was getting a time-based feed anyway. So Mastodon was just what I was used to anyway. But more people than I expected actually liked the Twitter algorithm, and couldn't cope with Mastodon's lack of magic ML stuff at all.
With Usenet, if you join, say, comp.ai, you know that (spam aside) you're just getting AI stuff. Same for comp.linux, comp.lang.c++, or whatever. There's something to be said for the topic hierarchy there.
I see a place for both ActivityPub and Usenet, personally. Although, again, acknowledging that somebody could probably in principle build the Usenet style experience on top of ActivityPub. But as far as I know, that part doesn't exist today. If it does, somebody please let me know.
Yes, having images available within mastodon is nice - that was always clunky with usenet.
When I used it it seemed like it was mostly real names (.edu accounts) at least on the groups I read, so maybe that kept people in check a bit. Though that would have been easy to spoof I'm sure.
My department also had some local groups that did not propagate. So it must be possible to stand up your own NNTP server and have groups for your local users that are at least in that sense "private"
I don't think the Usenet model can be replicated on top of Fediverse. Not everyone sees instances as a topic thing (I host my own instance).
Since it's all ActivityPub, you can follow Lemmy communities from a Mastodon client but the UX in that case is pretty bad (e.g. Mastodon servers won't backfill posts so you won't see any history).
Or just join an instance that is not explicitly political. You don't have to be on beehaw or hachyderm.
Also, some quirky usenet groups aren't available elsewhere, such as alt.binaries.*
There's a newsgroup still extant which is named after a woman who spoke up about the CSAM problem on our local university's server (I stumbled across it myself once, there was some nasty fucking shit going through there). The users of these groups did not take kindly to people messing with their access to pictures of children being sexually abused. Not naming her or the newsgroup because I'm sure she's long since gotten it in her rear view mirror.
The threading and only seeing new messages is a lot better in my Usenet client than any web forum that I use, including this one.
Yep. The Usenet experience is nice. The only thing that really got me out of the habit of participating frequently was a combination of two factors:
1. My ISP quit providing NNTP access by default
2. So many other people moved off, that a lot of the groups became nothing but CfP's, spam, and maybe 1 actual interesting post per year.
But in the spirit of "be the change you want in the world" I guess I'll bit the bullet and sign up for a Usenet account somewhere, or stand up my own server and look into what it would take to get peering setup.
What's that stand for?
One could in stead have a "i don't know where to put this" section that forces the mod to move or delete it.
Indeed! This is the other less-spoken flaw of walled-garden communication apps. Since they are proprietary, you're stuck with the very limited functionality the company has decided to implement (and it's always very limited).
With open protocols such as SMTP and NNTP, there's no limit to how feature rich the clients (plural, since there can be many clients attuned to different tastes) can be. And you can always pipe things to a shell for an infinitely extensible set of capabilities.
I find all the proprietary communication apps so frustrating, knowing that my email and usenet clients even back in the 80s had tons of more functionality and flexibility.
Isn't this why some groups were moderated?
Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one.
It's been a while since I looked. I could have sworn there were at least a handful, but either A. I might be mis-remembering or B. the landscape might have changed since I checked last.
That said, there seem to be quite few who offer cheap if not actually free access. And by "cheap" I mean, on the order of $10.00 (USD) / month or less.
If you do not care about binary files then use https://www.eternal-september.org, it's free.
Some free servers are still around, but don't offer public accounts. Few places give account, if you ask. Eternal September is strongest-biggest still running and free service. Mixmin allows anonymous posting, but sometimes restricts it to fight with abuse. Google still relays groups to Usenet, though they have their own thing going and some servers are blocking posts from google.
Not free, but a few dollars for ARPA membership for life is good.
AFAIK the best options are https://www.eternal-september.org/ and https://usenet.blueworldhosting.com/ (read only though).
Web interfaces:
https://www.rocksolidbbs.com/rocksolid/article-flat.php?id=8...
https://www.novabbs.com/rocksolid/article-flat.php?id=715&gr...
Check the alternative hierarchies and connection options while you're at it.
The difference, I suppose, is that Google Groups are run by autopilot with nobody in the cockpit, Eternal September doesn't ask the average user too many questions (it is as accepting as its name suggests), but those small server admins will ask you questions if you start posting crap, and will delete it, and ban the account.
Any suggestions?
One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read.
Aggregators can occupy public keys as their "address" and any aggregator that gets obnoxious, you just trim it from your list, which only contains things you've either let in or accepted via slates or whitelists.
Then the spammers can do whatever they like, really.
I believe the main reason usenet faded so thoroughly was that it became a piracy distribution platform very early on (not sure which came first, the pirate booty or the porn booty, but I'm guessing porn), and very quickly there came a kind of unspoken "don't talk about usenet" code among those who already knew about it. At the time, Napster and bittorrent were the main targets of the authorities and IP trolls and usenet was just doing a Jim-From-The-Office-smirking-through-the-blinds.
I believe it was due to AOL and CompuServe forums, which were most importantly, new, novel, friendly and easy. Technical people were "above" AOL and so those Usenet communities survived a few more years, but ultimately succumbed to web forums which were superior to Usenet in almost every way.
Unfortunately, web forums were mostly hollowed out due to social media, and now that people are sick and tired of that, the simplicity and "innocence" of early 2000's forums, and even 90s Usenet, seems appealing (although tinted by rose-colored nostalgic glasses).
Much much easier than using a search engine, scrolling through the results which were half ads even in those days, and trying out the 12 different forums you finally found which were even active...
- Group list
- Usenet client
Most people had no clue what that stuff was.
interesting, given that all your references to it are in the past tense
And yet the German groups started a slow but steady decline after their peak in 2001: http://usenet.dex.de/de.ALL.html
I was active in the German Usenet back then and still remember that between around 2001 and 2005 the spammers and trolls took over and destoyed one group after another until they were completely unusable. I also mostly quit around maybe 2005.
So I highly doubt that Usenet would have continued to work if ISPs had just continued support it. Usenet only worked as long as everyboy was nice to each other, it would never work today without much better moderation protocols and tools.
Had peering been more on demand, rather than a firehouse, maybe people would have kept them longer.
I for a while worked on an aggressively caching NNTP server as an option because of the costs involved.
YouTube appeared in 2005 and was losing VAST amounts of money before Google bought them out. So, even in 2005, Usenet probably was still too expensive.
Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably never even knew it existed.
ISPs became client-less after broadband became widespread. ISPs didn't want to write or provide software, they just wanted to provide data over basic cable/DSL. Even AOL instant messenger eventually faded, as it never really adapted itself to a non desktop centric web.
But let's take something else from the same era and provide a comparison for the average user: yahoo.com. You typed it into the browser, and you were instantly presented with several hundred interesting links. No config necessary, just click and go. The UX needed to be that simple.
Actually discovering good channels on Usenet took time and investment. As opposed to Reddit, for example, which used upvotes and decay based algorithms (also, see HN) to make fresh subreddits discoverable on the main feed.
That’s why I had to retire my company’s internal NNTP setup - because at some point, too many users were just using it through the web and email gateway that it was cumbersome and made no senses to keep it running.
Spam was the issue – there were extensions and initiatives to combat it, but it was a losing battle. It was a major cultural loss – Reddit can at its best approach it, but not replace what existed in the early nineties.
Usenet faded because it wasn't monetizable, outside of subscription based binary providers (who were in large part turning around and pumping that money into the legal defense funds, because they were primarily servicing the swashbuckling community).
The platforms that are actively used are codependent. They demand you use them. They send you emails when you haven't logged in in awhile. They foment opposition just to keep you engaged, so you'll view their ads.
Usenet, on the other hand, lets you use it, if you feel like it, assuming you know where to look.
The only sort of people who would use Usenet would be those that make decisions for themselves, rather than doing what the marketers tell them. It never stood a chance against this sort of opposition.
I ran my own news server in the 90's, receiving about a dozen groups over dialup with a UUCP feed.
I think you mean that posters would sign with their private keys and you would have a list of public keys that you would verify the signature against.
That, incidentally, is also a valid approach to email spam...
The most important thing that web forums like this one enable is interaction between people who don't know each other.
There are many ways to skin this cat, but every one that's gonna work involves cooperation, rather than adversarial control.
This article talks about Google Groups in the present tense, even though its Usenet hosting permanently ceased around 8 years ago.
That's the rising again part.
https://groups.google.com/g/de.soc.recht.steuern+buchfuehrun... https://groups.google.com/g/de.soc.recht.misc
(The second group even has some recent spam in it, which is rare nowadays.)
I know tons and tons of nerds with extreme technical hobbies. None of them have ever talked to me about still using Usenet. The only place I hear about it is for Seedbox stuff.
The crux of the article is that the Big-8 board has reconvened and is active again; I spent a paragraph or two on that. That's what is back, and that is what the headline is about.
Google Groups is still current and comparing a couple of groups to my Eternal September feeds, they are in sync, so I call [[citation needed]] on that. If you can't back it up, I think it's disinformation you've picked up somewhere.
You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software. All of this to access what is essentially a pure text forum.
Frankly I am not interested in jumping through hoops to access something which an "average person" would have no hope in hell of figuring out. Maybe that's part of the attraction, that only dedicated geeks will use it?
Text-only newsgroup servers are free. You only need to use/pay for indexers if you’re scouring many groups for specific keywords.
If you’re subscribing to specific text groups you don’t need to search an index for the whole net. You can just scroll to the top and read what you missed since last session
The barrier of entry is learning how to use a piece of software like Thunderbird. It’s no larger than email. If you figured that one out, you can figure out newsgroups too.
I remember when everyone was deriding “the internet” and “email” as being too cumbersome for an “average person” to figure out, having too many “hoops” to jump through to use it.
Thanks for the nostalgia, wackget
The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content.
That was really one of the two things that killed Usenet in the 2000's. One was the rise of phpBB forums, and then Reddit. The other was the seediness of the Usenet binaries scene. As the "legit" users migrated to web-based forums, the pirates made up a larger and larger portion of those staying behind, and eventually the network effort flowed in reverse until critical mass was lost.
I deeply miss that old Usenet culture of the 1990's. In comparison to HN and especially Reddit, Usenet was far less reverent, frumpy, and up-its-own-ass politically and socially. At the same time, it's impossible to try to recreate that on a forum today, without it breaking down into nothing but alt-right hate speech. The 1990's was a fun and quirky little period of Internet sanity, made possible only by how small and outside the mainstream the Internet still was.
Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original.
Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods.
But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's taking for granted really basic things, like search, that were space alien tech on Usenet.
Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse on Usenet.
Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups. In particular, alt.* and *.binaries.* would be unavailable pretty much anywhere that had "cost of bandwidth" or "reputation" concerns.
And if you repeatedly posted abusive content to any Usenet group, you can bet that your account and/or entire site would be "cancelled" from the network pretty quickly by the infamous "Usenet cabal" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal). Not to mention that Usenet was the entire origin for the concept of the "killfile".
Finally, the most popular Usenet hubs (say, UUnet) were very much for-profit...
Right, but that was not due to nntp, it was due to the bandwidth economics of the times. I ran a small site that only connected once a day when the phone call was cheaper. But if you have a permanent connection largely unconstrained on bandwidth, it'll be faster.
> This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter.
But yes, that as well. When a response takes at least 2 days, there is an incentive to write well and thoroughly. The instant response chat-type forums of today encourage meaningless ping-pong responses.
> Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups
This is a very fundamental difference between a distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized walled garden. A specific usenet site, as you say, might choose to not carry certain newsgroups. That is local control, not usenet censorship. Usenet as a whole still distributes it. If you want access you can just switch to a different usenet provider. You can also run your own provider! That's what makes it so wonderful. You are in control, not some single central site. There is no central site.
No, but that's mostly because NNTP yet had to be invented (RFC977 is from 1986, a good 6 years after Usenet started, and was mostly used for client access, not backbone propagation, which was usually 'whatever cnews does' over UUCP).
> This is a very fundamental difference between a distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized walled garden.
Yet much closer to 'censorship' than whatever goes on at your typical walled garden today. The whole idea that Usenet was some sort of egalitarian free-for-all is just wrong: if you stepped out of line, you would lose your soapbox fast, often by an entire group/hierarchy/site being cut off.
But even if it did not get that far, the last response you would ever get on a group being plonk (the sound of being added to a killfile, often side-wide) was common. Besides that, *.moderated groups were also a thing, where messages would only be published upon manual approval from the group owners.
I started on usenet in the late 80s, so my worldview always had NNTP.
> Yet much closer to 'censorship' than whatever goes on at your typical walled garden today.
This is not true at any level. Again, in a walled garden there is only one master, it's in or out, you are in or out.
Usenet is completely distributed, there is no center. Each site and each person can choose to not distribute or see certain things, but that has no influence outside their sphere of control. My site might no carry a given group, but many others do so I have choices. I might plonk you, but everyone else in the world sees your posts.
<http://article.olduse.net/467@sdchema.UUCP>
This would mean that part of the bang path for Bob Kummerfeld's email address was in fact a 747: "!sdchema!sydney!bob"
This may reflect the state today, but back in the late 90's and early 00's, it was not. Even for the pure text forums, you had to pay someone. In the earlier days it was included in the ISP package, so you wouldn't see the costs. Or via your university. But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere.
For me: I used BBS's before I used USENET. BBS groups ("conferences") were much more civil, and had much better discourse. The moderation was very effective. When I moved to USENET, it was quite chaotic by comparison. And then with the onset of spam, I went elsewhere.
Unless they dropped it _really_ early, there was dejanews/google groups, surely?
Google Groups's interface sucks by comparison.
I played a few games of Tradewars on one of these a while ago. It sure brought back the days of being a sysop of my local BBS growing up.
Everyone is playing LORD (Legend Of the Red Dragon) there.
If the only people who can join are those who are passionate enough to read a lot of documentation and jump through a lot of hoops, yeah, the quality of discourse will be better.
Heck even /. Had better trolls in the day than what reddit has now.
P.S. For many Usenet groups, you don't need to pay anything to get access.
I'm not sure what an "indexer" is, such that you'd need to subscribe to it; is that some kind of online service like Deja News? I used to just download everything that appeared on the handful of groups that interested me, and store it locally. Then I could do local searches.
That "store locally" capability wasn't some bag of bash scripts I cobbled together; I thought all newsreaders could do that natively.
Honestly it might be worth resurrecting the protocol to run your own Usenet web UI just for weekend funsies.
Used the "comp.*" heirarchy mostly, discussing technical topics and answering questions - in 1996, a publisher (Wiley!) sent me a box of books - apparently I had helped one of their authors and they wanted to thank me.
On-one-hand, I would like to try it again - OTOH, I think spam and/or bots would overwhelm it to the point of uselessness.
Anyway, this is probably an even higher hoop to jump through.
When Usenet was big, you didn't need a paid subscription. Almost every ISP included it for free.
I never heard of an indexer.
Client software came with your operating system, or it was built in to your e-mail client, or you could download for free.
As for today — yes, how awful that you might have to pay for something. Completely terrible. It might even be half the price of a cup of coffee. Completely unacceptable to have to give someone money for something of value. Terrible.
Much better to lock oneself inside the mink-lined, free, censored, AI-curated cages of the big data corps. Not thinking is always so much easier and more comfortable than thinking.
https://blog.panic.com/unison-2/ https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-unison/
https://www.astraweb.com is the best provider I know
A lot of the early ISPs, 1993-early 2000s, had free nntp/usenet services. The "friction" of using usenet was not any greater that the friction of launching an email client, an ftp or gopher session, or launching Mosaic.
At the time there were many easy-to-use featureful nntp clients across most computing platforms. I remember liking MT-Newswatcher quite a bit as well as Nuntius. The UI of Newswatcher was not too different from an email client or perhaps directory browser.
Screenshots from MT-Newswatcher
https://smfr.org/mtnw/screenshots.htmlReally? I'm old enough to remember when Google bought Deja, and with it suddenly came the ability to search the entire Usenet archive going back to its inception, through the Google Groups interface. Being able to search the archives of comp.lang.whatever was a great educational and productivity booster, like Stackoverflow before SO.
> You need a paid (!) subscription
30 years ago (and I'd say even 20 years ago) every ISP had their own usenet feed just like they had their own email server. It's only fairly recently this has become a bit of a barrier (although as many have noted in this discussion, free ones exist so not much of a barrier). My ISP discontinued their usenet server in 2016, fairly recently.
Installing a client is one package-install command away, not exactly a barrier.
And yeah, the best part about usenet was that there were fewer "average people" on there. The Internet was great before AoL connected everybody else to it ;)
Tell us that you didn't RTFA without saying that you didn't RTFA.
By the way, I wrote the article.
If you've been around since before Google as you claim, you should know to RTFM and RTFA.
Attempts to "retro-moderate" previously posted messages by using the NNTP cancel mechanism were only widely effective in the very early 1980s, and rapidly became problematic due to disagreements, forgery, and vandalism.
source: Hosted a moderated newsgroups FAQ for decades, helped convert news.newusers.questions to a moderated group - which may have been a case of "we had to destroy the village to save it" :-(
"Rises like a phoenix" is a bit hyperbolic.
I was looking through my archives of old text files a decade ago, and noticed that, to my horror, in 1982, I had spammed Punternet for water filters I was trying to sell as a teenager. Punternet was like Fidonet, but for C64 Punter BBS systems.
And I'm sure someone spammed before me.
Amusingly, I received a reply from someone on Texas, which blew my mind in 82, in Canada.
If it weren't hyperbolic and a tad over the top, it wouldn't be The Register.
I wrote the article.
Note, generally (not always) the editors and subeditors write the headlines, not the authors. They have a pretty good idea of what brings the clicks in, far better than me.
Aaaaaallll righty then.
Usenet's downfall came from no management of resource usage or abuse-management costs (both of the spam and the "that message is illegal" sort).
Sites dealt with mounting costs by outsourcing to specialists, which lost a lot of usenet's distributed advantages (e.g. local copies providing for ultra low latency access, availability during outages, traffic sharing when many users were using the same groups, only having to appeal to your choice of local authorities to carry something rather than distant ones that didn't get a crap about you, etc).
Due to overhead costs it's cheaper for fewer providers to support more users, this along with acquisitions caused the centralization onto a few and then essentially one usenet provider who then implemented policy (monetization schemes, walled gardens, censorship) that eliminated the residual benefits of usenet over alternatives. The alternatives were more flexible, and had less baggage (particularly the quasi-monopoly provider), and with no reason left to use usenet over them eventually they took over.
(Granted, it was written in the early 90s but feels very apropos to see a post about it here on HN)
The parts where the organization is notifying its users:
"Sorry, a giant AI is using all of our bandwidth" reminded me of several conversations I've had with networking teams over the years.
Usenet with full access to a big server was fun. With just NNTP access, it was diminished. 3 to 6 hops out in UUCP/WWIV/FIDOnet land it was a different animal. Still of use but high friction.
it wouldn't be polite to scan the whole spool, just the groups that might bear results.
kibo was an anomaly
i had a shell on a big server for a while; i fed the hinterlands with selective feeds.
This is a fascinatingly different opinion I can't wrap my head around.
To me it seems self-evident that every web-based or proprietary app message board interface is immensely worse than even the most primitive usenet reader of the 80s.
Imagine Hacker News, if instead of Hacker News, you had only Gmail's interface and Gmail threading. That's what we put up with.
I spent a lot of time on Usenet. I miss it a lot, in the same way I miss, like, trip-hop. It was a thing of its time. I don't so much want to engage with it now.
It was great, at the time, because there was nothing else like it. But there's no Usenet group I can think of that doesn't have a message board equivalent today that blows it completely out of the water. I think a lot of people are nostalgic for Usenet because they miss the feeling of discovering worldwide communities; today, they're a dime a dozen.
You should not assume, does not lead to good conversation.
I've been nonstop on usenet since the late 80s, still am. I used to run a site for my university. I was a heavy poster and reader through the 90s. My usage volume has decreased, but still sometimes post. Read daily. Usenet rocks. Wish it had more participation, as it used to have. It is so much better than anything else we've come up with.
> you had only Gmail's interface and Gmail threading
Ugh, no, gmail threading is abysmally terrible. Something like trn is far superior.
Tell me how you can do any of these things in a so-called modern forum/chat app:
- Say I want to killfile tptacek? Ok, some apps allow blocking people, HN doesn't.
- Say I want to upscore posts from tptacek that mention crypto but downscore anything that doesn't. Impossible on any "modern" app that I know of.
- Say I want to pipe every post through my custom bayesian scoring filter. Impossible on any "modern" app that I know of.
- Say I want to pipe every post through a custom app that scans for key phrases I want to be alerted on, send those to my email.
I could go on and on. The sites and apps we are forced to use today are lacking 99% of the functionality that was trivially possible back in the 90s.
I guess you're thinking that one could curl down the text and then process it locally as much as one wishes, feed it to some custom reader and consume it that way. Which you're right, is possible, but not exactly within HN at that point.
And HN is the simplest use case. Tell me how I do any of the above things with messages people insist on sending via whatsapp or facebook or any such walled gardens that go out of their way to prevent interoperability?
Give me SMTP and NNTP, open standards with infinite flexibility where I own and control the experience.
I think that NNTP is better than much of the newer too complicated and messy protocols. I also think is better than using mailing lists, too. NNTP also you can (like mailing lists, but unlike web forums) compose drafts on your computer and read messages that have already been downloaded, even if the internet connection (or the NNTP server) is currently not working, and then you can send/receive once it does work.
Technology choices inspired by nostalgia are not always the best bet, but if you're going all the way, I suggest a return to FidoNet Echomail.
http://ftsc.org/docs/fts-0004.001 should get you started, and I'm sure you'll figure out a way to make node assignments decentralized.
2:285/11.2 signing off. But I still have some bad C code implementing an Echomail processor, if you need it...
And of course; good faith is all that we have here.
So, to rephrase things: because of you, Usenet is dead. And BitTorrent is dead. And any future technology anything like it will be dead-on-arrival, because you simply don't grok how the world works.
And I'm very well aware that "the way the world works" is in direct conflict with "the way you think the world should be working", but that's the exact issue here.
You are Eternal September, personified. Good luck with that!
My question was, how did you envision BitTorrent working?
It seems rather that the value of the text groups was not high enough to get people to pay ~ anything as we scaled the internet and other text forums became widely available.
Text is ~ free. People typing at 180wpm only generate ~120bps of uncompressed text. A song is 2000x that, a video 10-100k x that. It seems like a model w paid barriers to entry to text forums is just not viable compared to free-to-the-user forums, or at least weren’t competitive when that ad-based model began.
I think it would be good for an open standard for text existed and was widely used, and didn’t rely on ads. But I don’t really see how logically one can blame the binaries for killing the text side of usenet. If people wanted to pay for text, they would have kept doing it. But as we’ve seen over the last 20 years, that business model has not generally worked.
How does this synchronization protocol work? How does one join the mesh? I've read the wikipedia article, and it kinda talks to the topology and such, but not in great detail.
Some of the big timesharing services (think Telenet and Tymnet, eventually even AOL) out there ran their own servers, which a lot of smaller services dialed into.
How do you join the mesh? You met someone at Usenix or a similar conference and said "I'm sitting on a whopping 800mb of storage and a T1 line at my university. I'm tired of waiting a week to get the new comp.lang.c hotness. Think I could hook up to your machine for Usenet?" and they'd be like "Cool! Yeah, here's the dialup number. Try to call after 11pm so my boss doesn't know about it."
NNTP took this concept of syncing files and made it Internet native and specific to Usenet. But the architecture remained largely the same.
I used to work in London, for Olivetti, which was partnered with AT&T. Olivetti's office was in Finsbury, just north of The City. AT&T were south of the river, near Vauxhall. I believe our Usenet feed (and our internet email) was couriered-over from Vauxhall on mag tape.
In those days, most ordinary businesses didn't have fixed-line internet access, and maintaining a Usenet feed over dial-up was expensive, even text-only.
You configure both configure your servers to exchange messages and then... they exchange messages :)
It's good practice to have a couple peers, in case one goes offline or doesn't carry the groups you're interested in -- or filters things you might want. I run NoCeM on-spool and have stricter-than-normal CleanFeed rules, which translated from Usenet admin speak means my server drops a lot of spam and garbage posts, and if you want those you'll have to get them from another peer.
A server might decide to exchange messages in groups A, B, C… with peers X, Y, Z. Choice of peers depends on their capacity, working hours, geographic location, network position, personal connections, access to dedicated lines… Choice of groups depends on popularity, space requirements, personal preferences, user requests… Some of them allow messages to spread step-by-step to all or almost all of the network, those are global groups. Some of them are only shared by a couple of servers or exist on a single server, those are local. Nothing prevents you from making a “boobble.shmoobble.goobble” group and stating that it's the central most important point of all Usenet. You only need to make all the rest believe it. Then there are additional complexities and tools to deal with batch transfers, figuring out which messages have not yet been seen by a peer since the previous interchange (you don't want X to send lots of updates to Z, then Y to take the same long time sending mostly the same updates to Z), choice of best next hop (routing, manual load balancing), and so on.
Of course, when synchronization is needed — say, for group moderator to be able to delete spam message from many servers holding that group instead of each admin doing that on each server independently, and to prevent reintroduction and further spread of the message, — it results in hairy ball of hacks on top of original architecture, and ad-hoc external trust channels, like with signatures. Understandably, Usenet appeared in a hierarchical and controlled professional environment (users were bound by formal and informal rules), then it was re-purposed for free for all operation.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
Yes, the example is about a monolithic service like Twitter, versus something distributed like Usenet. But distributed services have to be hosted somewhere, and two contradictory themes from this discussion are:
- Usenet was more widely used when it was universally available (i.e., commercial ISP's ran news servers)
- Commercial ISP's no longer wish to run news servers due to legal liability and pressure from U.S. states attorneys general
Mom-and-pop server operators won't be as universal, and won't be able to afford expensive staff and lawyers to deal with legal issues.
"X Protocol is extensible!"
"So is a bucket of molten pig-iron."
There is definitely a lot of "intentionality" required to access newsgroups, let alone do more complicated stuff like moderate a newsgroup, when the answer to how to set it up in many environments is like that other old joke about a hotel where you have to make your own bed:
"Here's a hammer and saw, good night!"
You'll likely want to honor the anti-spam ones as they're deleting spam. Most sites limit the sources of cancel messages they honor (and have checks to make sure that its you who are deleting your own messages).
Back in the day, censorship was an issue because everyone would honor everyone's cancel messages and, well, talking about a contentious political topic would likely have people attempting to forge cancel messages.
https://yarchive.net/mil/bomber_duel.html
recommending Usenet Archives collected by Norman Yarvin
Back to basics with volunteer-relays and zero servers. Carry your own texts anywhere without censorship. Share files, share tweets (xeets), just share anything with anonymity.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed usenet and IRC. I still enjoy BBS today, the only thing that really replaced the 90s feeling of the usenet is truly Nostr.
Does anyone have a recommendation for an actually good native Mac Usenet app tailored for, like, normal discussion?
Text is timeless, and it's worth keeping an open mind that it can work. Maybe specific niche interests are the key; crypto is a big topic now, but back then only a few enthusiasts cared.
To get access: If you're looking to get into it and browse around, it's unlikely that your ISP provides free NNTP server access. Mine did when I first got into it in the mid-2000's but they don't anymore. https://news.gmane.io/ provides a free NNTP interface to just mailing lists if you're looking to test clients without paying money. If you want cheap access to all of it from a provider that has fully working headers, $2 will get you a 2GB non-expiring account at https://usenet-news.net/index1.php?url=home that should last a very long time for text groups.
As for clients, on mobile there's nothing available for android last I've checked. On iOS there's NewsTap, it's not the best app but it works. Main complaints I have is it fetches using single connection so it's slow to update large newsgroups and it doesn't appear to have a normal killfile support so you can't filter very well. This is honestly the main client I use for the few groups I subscribe to since it's convenient.
Thunderbird I'm told some people like. I can't recommend it at all, it has non-working TLS support for NNTP which seems like a joke but I assure you it is not. Going on 16+ years of ignoring RFC4642: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420262 The only way to workaround it beside using unencrypted NNTP servers is to run a local TLS proxy on your system or just use unencrypted NNTP connections.
Pan is an ok GUI alternative on Linux, it had fallen into severe coderot and at least Gentoo had dropped it but is actively maintained again: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pan My main complaint is it crashes from time to time. But it has working TLS so there's that. I've picked up maintaining it in the GURU repo as I don't feel it's stable enough to re-add to the main package repo yet.
Tin is probably the best CLI client. If you can get it started and connected to your provider it just works without fuss. Main gripe is the startup flags and having to manually write config file, it pretty much requires reading manpage. By default it'll connect to gmane though so you can mess around with that.
On Windows I've only really used Newsleecher briefly. It has a neat feature of having its own header index. This was useful because my main Usenet provider switched upstream providers and broke headers for most of my text groups. I could fetch articles from the server but without working headers I wouldn't know the articles were there in the first place. This is a side effect of most providers focusing on binary subscribers.
Spam is still an issue but it's less an issue than what it was. Most is easy to filter and there's only a few major spammers (like the dude ranting in allcaps Italian about politicians). The main 'spam' is clueless Google Groups users responding to 25 year old dead threads that it is unlikely your Usenet provider still carries. The biggest hurdle a new user will have is finding active groups. Some I'm in only get a few posts per year but are technically active (like the Thinkpad related ones). There's a few that get tons of posts daily.
There's PhoNews, but it wasn't very good the last time I tried the free version. It ran slowly, or sometimes not at all, trying to follow a small number of newsgroups off of an NNTP server run by my ISP (that otherwise worked well with other non-mobile newsreaders).
I never liked Usenet, but when I was a teenager I posted some embarrassing, angsty, awkward messages in the alt.* space, so I was glad for many reasons when it rightly died off. If it rises, phoenix-like, I probably still won't use it. And if those messages (which I have searched for since) are recovered, I'll blame it on that one guy in Florida who has my same name.
Comparison with reddit might be useful.
The only fundamental distinction I can draw is that there's no unified source of identity in usenet. All the rest of the differences come down to moderation policies.
I'm not sure about Reddit, I don't use it often, but if you can only follow forums and not people, I would not call it a social network either.
Before the rise of the web, Usenet definitely was the front page of the internet, though--to a greater degree than Reddit ever was.
Part of the nostalgia for Usenet I think is nostalgia for a time when corporations had very little influence on the internet. Although most of the people running Usenet (and maintaining Usenet software) in the 1980s and early 1990s were involved with software and the Internet as part of their job, running Usenet was not part of their job description.
IRC and the first massively-multiplayer online games (which were text-only and called MUDs) were the same way.
Till the early 1990s the US government paid most of the bills for running the internet, but used its influence very sparingly: there was a rule against commercial activity (which I think was motivated by appeasing commercial interests worried that the internet would compete with their services) and there were attempts made to make it less likely that the internet would get criticized by Congresspersons and journalists as an expensive waste of money: e.g., Jerry Pournelle's getting kicked off MIT's terminal servers circa 1985 out of fear that he would be careless in how he would write about the internet. And that is the extent of the rules imposed by the US gov that I know about.
I think of IRC, Mastadon, and Jabber as social networks; If you rule out Jabber it seems to me you must also rule out AIM.
Perhaps we're fumbling for a new vocabulary term, and "Social network" is too vague to be effective.
I was talking about the term "social media".
I learned basic scripting by writing rooms and content for MUDs, I love them and sometimes wistfully think about starting one up.
> designed to create and make use of a graph of relationships between people.
I assert that a universe of people maintaining killfiles is exactly this. It is the default-trust map of social network, in which one imagines that the exceptional cases are those whom one wishes to shun.
I think a requirement that one be able to "follow a person", that is to say watch all the things that individual says, is excessive. We're getting down into the weeds here, but I think following topics and threads are much more useful than following humans.
Usenet was not designed for kill files. Kill files were designed for Usenet. You could construct a very limited social graph from everyone's kill files. But no one had everyone's kill files. And you could construct a limited social graph from everyone's tax records also. Are taxes a social network?
Easy comparison: Mastadon has distributed identity, and localized management of moderation. Is this sufficient that we should deem it "not a social network"? I think not.
I think there was no real consensus in USENET towards the appropriate degree of moderation, rather several standing waves of opinion. All the species of technically simple moderation patterns were present there: A species of subscriber, or every message approved (basically only a radically small set of approved posters) and so on. Since some of the newsgroups are functionally archives of mailing lists, there's a whole additional universe of moderation techniques applied "upstream".
Good point. Something created for the explicit purpose of competing with (in the sense of taking users away from) a social network should be called a social network.
I consider voting (allowing readers to upvote and downvote, which is extremely quick and easy compared to writing a comment) an important technically simple moderation pattern, and I'd be very surprised to learn the voting on Usenet articles was ever possible.
Wow, it's like I'm reading a collection of everyone's spam folder with some flares of racism for good measure.
Is there _any_ moderation on Usenet? How do I get it?
For now I think I'll stick to Mastodon (Canadians, join cosocial.ca co-op!)