1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Usenet is more or less dead. From thousands of servers to just a couple of free real Usenet servers and 60 or so corporate ones.
Its nice that there are a couple of free text only ones left, but the days of all universities and ISPs and anyone else sharing are long gone.
Back when usenet was the main subculture channel every ISP had a usenet server and many would mirror parts of the binaries trees of requested. Some would compete by offering more of the entire usenet feed
Everyone on the internet used it.
Now it's a desert. You can dig for old opinions, old software. There's no community outside the copyright infringement community.
The ISP competitions ah yes.
I also want to say (as in other comments I have posted) there are some communities exclusive to just discussion but they are rather slow and small.
Http is becoming a dystopian wasteland
I would love to hear your opinion on the gemini protocol
I like the terminal but I like decentralization more.
Where does that put you in terms of your relationship with USENET?
I don't use it. I have not used the terminal much except for specific admin type commands and running scripts since the teens started. I really was trying to look for terminal things that could funtion like a gui. in particular email. I wanted the calendar function. I finally gave up and accepted gui as the main interface.
I loved USENET back in the day, but it doesn't do what it used to.
Pure, or nearly pure text boards are still useful, but that's how I use Lemmy now. I just wish it had more general buy-in.
Honestly, you could look at USENET as federation before federation needed to be a thing. Way back when it was all hosted mostly on university servers. Lemmy seems to me to be very much the heir to USENET.
I would say that I liked the simpler technology stack that it used to communicate, even working over high-latency high-throughput transfer links (i.e. Tape drives over 747s back in the day). Though that is specifically UUCP related rather than USENET as a whole.
I also prefer the text based nature of USENET, it was simpler and honestly easier to create whole fleshed out ideas. Your article had a nice stage and a spotlight all to its own in each message pane, meanwhile the modern forums have you view the text within surrounding comments or text. I just think it makes it less intimate than it was before. Though, easier to scroll through
Text is faster than a web browser. No JS. High quality conversations.
This may it sound like a silly question but what kind of high quality conversations? It's been so long since I've used USENET. I'm not even sure how you connect with conversations on there.
Its honestly about connecting with the conversation, reading everyone's replies and seeing if it is something you would want to comment on and think you could bring something to the table in doing so. Or you could just join in the memery
Just like these forums you see now.
However, I do think the format substantially encouraged a higher level of engagement since you're comments and thoughts weren't squished in between everyone elses'. If someone wanted to read your thoughts on the thread it was exclusively your's that they would look at. Like I said in other comments, its a more intimate experience compared to normal comment sections.
I remember talking to real experts in programming and C++. Hacker News used to be like that, but they became stupid with AI.
Back in the before time, I was having a problem getting a new ethernet card working in Linux. I posted a question in USENET, and got a reply from the guy who wrote the driver for the NIC. I supplied the info he asked for and he got the driver working for the new NIC.
Thats what I love to hear!
the lack of JS is one of my fave features about it. I don't have to really worry about running remotely provided code when I just want to read a discussion.
Also, I do agree. Usually the conversations are rather insightful, though thats probably just the people
Well, I'm here rather than on Usenet. Overall, I think that the Threadiverse is preferable
Usenet had real spam problems for a long time.
But if you want some benefits:
Wide range of powerful, mature clients with extensive filtering functionality, offline reading support.
Better client-side accessibility. I mean, you can be blind and use a screenreader or something on Usenet. Going to be a lot less ideal on the Threadiverse.
Comment editors are probably better than the in-browser textarea editors or clients with limited text-editors that I've seen (though the Threadiverse has Markdown as a standard, which I think is generally preferable). Though I haven't been browsing Usenet in some time, and maybe they have MIME-encoded Markdown or HTML or something as a common thing now.
More-standardized support for posting embedded binaries.
Commercial service is available. It's great that people donate their time and funds to make Threadiverse servers run, but there's something to be said for the resources available from commercial service. There's nothing stopping someone from running a commercial Threadiverse instance, but AFAIK, nobody presently is doing so.
Newsgroups are more discoverable than are communities on the Threadiverse
you really need to use the https://lemmyverse.net/ index to find any communities out there, as otherwise you'll only see it once the exact name "!community@instancename" has been searched for on your local instance. Usenet (mostly) propagated newsgroups everywhere.
Probably a larger userbase, though I haven't dug up current numbers. Certainly a different group and set of interests.
Some PGP use and client support.
I would bet that Usenet servers can scale up to more load than can Threadiverse servers.
Wide range of powerful, mature clients with extensive filtering functionality, offline reading support.
Sadly this isn't really the case anymore. All the to previously used clients (other than command line) for most major platforms have been dead for over a decade now due to the drop in usage of USENET during the 2000s. With that as well there never were any actual mobile clients that were developed (as a side note).
Better client-side accessibility. I mean, you can be blind and use a screenreader or something on Usenet. Going to be a lot less ideal on the Threadiverse.
I think this has a lot to deal with just the tech stack required to run the modern Threadiverse. I honestly liked the simple and low-level aspects of USENET vs HTTP based alternatives. USENET was defined by objectively shorter standards than what current HTTP and Web technologies define. It also meant a larger selection of clients (and the possibility to create your own) due to the greater simplicity of standards required for it to function.
Since it was also was built as function over form vs the Web's reciprocal approach it makes implementations like screen readers much more difficult unless the developers specifically include that into their Threadiverse software
Comment editors are probably better than the in-browser textarea editors or clients with limited text-editors that I’ve seen (though the Threadiverse has Markdown as a standard, which I think is generally preferable).
Markdown is nice I just find it hard to read sometimes due to it kinda being like a web page within a web page. Or better put it's more like if you took a physical scroll of simple comments (no headers, no nothing, just text) and then pasted (physically) a fully formatted document as if it were just another comment ignoring any kind of page start or end. It just feels odd to look at. I hope that all made sense.
Though I haven’t been browsing Usenet in some time, and maybe they have MIME-encoded Markdown or HTML or something as a common thing now.
There is the option to include HTML in messages but I think that is generally considered bad form just due to the nature of embedding images into articles rather than having them as some kind of message attachment is not really in the spirit of the minimal nature of USENET.
More-standardized support for posting embedded binaries.
Maybe uuencode and base32/64 as yEnc wasn't really a proper standard and more so defacto which lead to some clients that decided to not implement it at all (MS, Mozilla; along with other mail client news readers)
Commercial service is available. It’s great that people donate their time and funds to make Threadiverse servers run, but there’s something to be said for the resources available from commercial service. There’s nothing stopping someone from running a commercial Threadiverse instance, but AFAIK, nobody presently is doing so.
The only real reason why the commercial service because a real big thing for USENET and pretty much the exclusive way to access it was because of the large amount of binary newsgroups, which in my opinion really destroyed USENET since it cause mass desertion of the system, including the horrible amount of spam.
As for a threadiverse instance it probably is best that it remain non-commercialized, or if it were to become so it wouldn't have as much an impact because the risk of storing gigantic binaries with little moderation is minimized.
Newsgroups are more discoverable than are communities on the Threadiverse — you really need to use the https://lemmyverse.net/ index to find any communities out there, as otherwise you’ll only see it once the exact name “!community@instancename” has been searched for on your local instance. Usenet (mostly) propagated newsgroups everywhere.
This is one of my biggest gripes I have with lemmy and the rest of the threadiverse. For me to discover new communities to subscribe to on a separate federated instance I have to navigate directly to said instance via the url bar of my browser and search them manually rather than be able to search for them from my instance. If they had some kind of community distribution function then it would be much simpler to find niche communities.
If this point isn't addressed eventually it might end up actually inadvertently contributing to the centralization of communities where everyone peers to lemmy.world for example just to get all the communities rather than seeing existing communities on other instances.
Probably a larger userbase, though I haven’t dug up current numbers. Certainly a different group and set of interests.
Its mostly graybeards and a lot of binary uploads. There are still quite a few active newsgroups though, you just have to look through the endless onslaught of past uploads in supposedly 'text only' newsgroups that have been overrun by binaries.
Really the only good provider that you can use to get the classic experience is eternal September (which is free btw)
I would bet that Usenet servers can scale up to more load than can Threadiverse servers.
This could be argued by saying that there wouldn't be a need to use web tech to service all the requests sure, but I honestly don't think that the scalability would be much different. Though, I am not in a position to provide actually insightful commentary on this specific subject.
Usenets great, pure text, tons of topics, its great. Same with Fidonet etc. Only downside is ISPs pushed it out to make access harder now.
Holy shit fidonet still exists?
Sure does
How do I access it?
Any major BBS should have a connection to it still.
I never used it but I heard it was rather similar to USENET
It was mirrored by independent BBS systems forming a dial up web independent of the internet. It was the fediverse of the 90s.
Usenet gave me my first girlfriend.
What did you pay for her?
They said, "gave". Sounds like she was free.
I wonder how big the download was.
Sailing the high seas.
They already said not warez though
Thanks for paying attention 😜
Is USENET used for piracy mostly?
sadly, yes
Yep
Relative anonymity
I don't know how Usenet works, but how is it anonymous? If it has central servers, police can just ask them for your IP address. If it's peer to peer, police or others can just participate and log your IP address.
I mean that is from the perspective of using it for piracy. Or what exactly do you mean by anonymity?
Usenet is a bit like the fediverse, it has tons of different servers that all talk to each other, and the admins of each server decide which groups it carries. So it you use a server outside the jurisdiction of the police you're afraid of you're somewhat anonymous.
The relative anonymity that I refer to is the lack of validation of posting profiles. This isn't on a level of layer 1, 2 or 3 but on how providers don't need any information linked to an ID or at times even emails (for those servers that don't require authentication for posting) You could define any email, name and user agent in the header fields as a posting profile and it would just accept it.
However, this particular aspect that in my eyes, as a whole, was a good thing regarding the system it did provide a strong foundation for the systemic spam problem that was seen across the board in all newsgroups. Accountability could not be maintained and the only thing to stop bad posts from getting through was quickly overwhelmed moderators.
So no, this isn't the same level of anonymity that we would expect from modern solutions but there also wasn't the same guardrails and requirements of identity that has been imposed upon the public like with modern accounts requiring email addresses and phone numbers.
There was a time where accounts didn't require an email. Side note, this is precisely why I like XMPP as a concept. Though I have found little use for it due to the network effect.
In line with nostalgia, some kind of tourism. People dress up as vikings and practice with axes, even though they don't remember the good ol' days of raiding monasteries.
