It just does not work for me for having proper discussions (it does have a ton of other features which do work great, but not that). Reddit is sort of ok, if you find the right community. And many of the forums I already visited before there even was a Reddit or Facebook stil exist nowadays and some of them are even more alive than all those years ago. Most of them are specific (eg. one sport, one music style), the general ones are mostly gone.
Have you found any online communities with excellent interfaces? Ideally open-source?
Unless discourse has an "inline recent posts" view? That would be superb, for users not willing to commit by default to clicking on a post. It's amazing how big a difference that can make, with the scroll-happy click-averse folks trained on Facebook.
(I'm developing this, and tweaking it a bit, maybe adding a config option so it becomes even more like the Facebook feed, is maybe something I should consider, hmm)
If you look at it on a smaller screen, like a mobile, it'll look a little bit even more like Facebook, ... but maybe more text from the posts should be included.
https://www.effectivediscussions.org/
It also includes chat features from Slack, and features from HackerNews (threaded comments) and StackOverflow (question-answers), + some improvements over HN & SO: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can.... (I'm developing it.)
We ended up using NodeBB because the person who was going to maintain it was more comfortable with Javascript than Ruby.
Roll your own!
On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.
Cliques did exist on newsgroups, but they had less tools at their disposal. In fact one of the reasons people left Usenet for inferior moderated web forums is because while they could (quite rightly) control their own experience, they (quite rightly) had no ability to control the group.
Ironically, although Usenet is considered to be dead these days, it's in some ways in better shape than ever.
20 years ago it suffered from its popularity, under attack from spammers and trolls attempting and often succeeding in destroying newsgroups.
These days it probably has more users than it had before the mid 90s internet explosion, whereas spammers and trolls have largely moved on to bigger audiences elsewhere.
It's strange for me to read people talking nostalgically about how the internet was better in the past, about online forums they were a part of 15 years ago, or Reddit or 4chan, and seemingly have no experience or even knowledge of Usenet.
And that something as similar and simple to use as email is ignored by people who rue the loss of old (web) forums.
Unlike web options Usenet is no-nonsense, free, has no admin headaches, no advertising, no Evil Corp owner (or potential sell out to Evil Corp when the community grows enough), it's anonymous, private and allows unrestricted speech (within applicable law, obviously).
All it requires is for people to use it.
> On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.
( And... you apparently got downvoted :-/ )
The most infuriating thing I experience on the Web is indeed to see awfully wrong comments being massively upvoted, next to perfectly right, on the point comments being (even slightly) downvoted. And I am not talking about opinionated comments, but just factual comments. It just drives me nuts.
I noticed that even here, when I write opinionated, or a bit rough and definitive, or a bit provocative comments, I often get upvoted (sometimes downvoted, but that's not a problem, I understand it for this kind of comments); but when I write to state purely technical, factual, documented, provable facts, I get downvoted. I just sounds insane. I can understand the difference of opinions, I can understand being upset about an opinion being roughly put in a short comment. But what I don't understand is people who downvote perfectly right purely technical comments (like for example fixing errors in a program), where there is only one truth, there is no opinion to have about it, it is either right right or wrong. That's beyond me.
I find the current single dimensional score limiting because of this. Sometimes I want to see a funny comment, sometimes I want to see an insightful one. Scoring them equivalently doesn't really make sense.
HN as it appears to regular users is pretty close to my ideal system, except that it greys out heavily downvoted posts and you can see the number of points you have personally.
This while the HN/Reddit "karma" score is a very much a e-peen score board.
A better idea than a web interface IMO is Usenet access simply built into a browser by default. It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, because they are closely related, but not many people use email clients any more, so not many people are going to find Usenet that way.
If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.
One part of me believes this would be the best native addon coming from Mozilla in years.
The other part of me worries it would bring on a new age of Eternal September to Usenet, which has been isolated long enough again to form a particular kind of culture that would seem fragile in the face of sudden mass immigration given the size of the Usenet community today.
That should explain at least part of the decision.
Newsgroups were always bundled with email clients, so Thunderbird has support for NNTP.
It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client,
because they are closely related, but not many people
use email clients any more, so not many people are
going to find Usenet that way.Never mind Opera 12 and older.
Could be that we will see Vivaldi revive this, if they ever get that far...
Last time I checked it needed you to subscribe through some provider who charges money, ISPs used to offer it with the Internet access. Is it really possible to access for free?
I can't seem to remember or find the exact list or page I saw before, but for anyone interested here are a couple of sites with a few of the other servers I remember.
Note: I haven't tested these, some may not work, some may not be deliberately open (perhaps just misconfigured), some may not allow posting, some may require registration, some may carry only a few local groups, etc etc etc.
Also, this post is related to text usage; if any of the following servers carry binary groups it's unlikely they'll have complete files.
blaine.gmane.org freenews.netfront.net news2.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
news-archive.icm.edu.pl news2.neva.ru gandalf.srv.welterde.de
And here:
news.tin.org news.prz.edu.pl gandalf.srv.welterde.de pb1.pair.com lugnet.com
ingebrigtsen.no freedommail.novaithelp.com news.alaska-software.com richelieu.ac-versailles.fr
news.cadsoft.de news.omnitel.net news.tugraz.at news.mt.net.mk news.man.rzeszow.pl
serv3.vsi.ru news.szaf.org pair1.php.net news.sotcom.ru news.mozilla.org x6.develooper.com
hq.tin.org news.grc.com iad.wholesalenewsinc.com news.math.ncu.edu.tw bbs.math.ncu.edu.tw
news.securecomp.org guest.dogagent.com ddt.demos.su news.dbase.com newsfeed.iif.hu
news.iif.hu vm-news.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de news.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de mx.sotcom.ru
It's been hard, but I've finally broken away from relying on the internet for friends and community. 2017 was the first year that I can remember where I spent more time with RL friends than internet friends.
It's an unusual place in many ways, not least for having been built by an idealistic (but pragmatic) lawyer who's been using it for, hmm, nation building?
The thing that makes them work where Facebook groups simply don't, I think, is pseudonymity. One of those groups has been particularly powerful, and it is a group that inherently involves being mutually vulnerable, so I certainly would never have joined under my real name, and I enjoy being part of the community even though only a handful of people know my IRL identity.
Reddit has some big problems, but is the best platform I have found so far for these niche communities. And my experience totally chimes with this article: big social media is as shallow as a puddle. Small niches are where real communities form.