And then there is GMANE.
README:
DFeed is:
an NNTP client
a mailing list archive
a forum-like web interface
an ATOM aggregator
an IRC botSome boards support RSS/Atom, and it will help finding new posts. It is not as good as the old usenet readers, but at least you save some time.
I should note that the BINARY usenet is still on fire, if you know what that's used for, that is.
My first experience with the Internet was via WebTV, and WebTV had a gated Usenet - only the users had access to it.
It was just full of red hot, vicious flame wars. In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general. Take away the barrier of entry, let the masses in without any moderation, and it will turn into a cesspool.
I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.
There was a very nice, easy-to-use NNTP server that was intended for small sites with few users, called leafnode. It is in a mature but still-maintained state. https://www.leafnode.org/status.shtml
I ran it on a laptop so I could slurp up my newsgroups and read them on the train with tin.
Another thing that was sometimes done for BBSes was setting yourself up as a 'point node':
> As the number of messages in Echomail grew over time, it became very difficult for users to keep up with the volume while logged into their local BBS. Points were introduced to address this, allowing technically-savvy users to receive the already compressed and batched Echomail (and Netmail) and read it locally on their own machines.[23]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points
This was obviated a bit with the creation of offline news readers (e.g., BlueWave):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)
The equivalent to QWK for Usenet were SOUP files:
* https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Fo...
It's all been downhill since then
Things haven't changed much since then.
There was a concerned expectation that there would be a distinct drop in the quality of USENET posts. They did not disappoint.
> Take away the barrier of entry, let the masses in without any moderation, and it will turn into a cesspool.
So much this. So many brilliant forums began to die as they were flooded with arrogant and foul-mouthed 13 year olds who thought it great fun to flame everybody. Gradually each of the ancient users who had contributed so much eventually logged out, never to reappear.
That and the new breed of Moderators who actively encouraged the trolls based on "any engagement is good".
Which forums do you mean? Every community I was part of has moved to facebook groups, Reddit or Discord. PhpBB has gone the way of the dodo (regrettably, since those were the "good old days" for me, since I never used usenet).
I'm on forums like these and they're doing totally fine. And if anything with the recent Reddit SNAFU the last thing users there want is for some central authority in SV to decide what they're allowed to talk about.
They've all abandoned forums and, regrettably, moved on to Facebook or Discord. I'll never understand why they choose Discord, a closed chat platform, for forum type discussions. At this point I feel like Quixote tilting at the wind mills.
https://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin/
https://el34world.com/Forum/index.php (A simple machines forum, this guy has been here forever, and he wrote his entire online shop himself)
There are a LOT of niche forums out there that are not FB/Discord, and keeping track of them is a pain. I do wish newsgroups were still a thing for hobbies.
I do wonder though, why on earth are so many communities moving to facebook and Discord, the two platforms that are decidedly worse than either usenet or phpbb. Some have come to realize facebook was a mistake, but may be committing an even worse one by moving to Discord.
Usenet and e-mail. Both message formats supported referencing the message being replied to since the early days:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc822#section-4.6
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc850#section-2.2.6
cave paintings => petroglyphs => pictograms => writing => printing => telegraph => telephone => wireless radio => television => compuserve => aol => newsgroups => digg => reddit ===> VR=====> neurolink ==========> “quantum ascension”
How’s this? Amazing how things have changed and how little foresight I have to see what comes next.
Facebook often doesn't even show you interesting discussions if the discussion is interesting to you but not for the average person.
Yet, for some reason, years ago most niche communities I belonged to ditched perfectly serviceable phpbb forums and moved to Facebook. Now there's a second exodus to Discord, as braindead as the one before.
And I truly don't understand Reddit to Discord. It has little or nothing to do with moderation or disagreement with Reddit policies, mind you. At least the ones I've seen, the reason is as vague as "wouldn't it be cool to have a Discord?". Why is never answered clearly.
Get a reader and sign up on https://www.eternal-september.org
The days of open servers are gone, but fairly permissive authenticated servers exist.
> Eternal September or the September that never ended[1] is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993[2] when Internet service providers[2] began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994,[3] leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.
The problem was the original maintainers had long sense expired, and each new phpBB release caused cascading bugs and became unmanageable. That and the increasing cost of running the servers, and the lack of backups and general maintenance.
The loss of these forums was real tragedy. So many thousands of priceless contributions from the original guru's has now been lost forever.
Also, HN's custom forum software feels significantly different than phpbb and similar forums: no quote blocks, no different fonts and colors, no embedded images, etc.
It was very much not perfect, though. Spam, hoaxes, and general crap abounded, and moderation was all-or-nothing and iffy at best. Hopefully, the ActivityPub world can avoid some of Usenet's mistakes and get us out of the single-point-of-failure model.
It's very true and the reason why he can't find anything textual on Usenet... Usenet is now filesharing primarily.
For once, I'm going to hire someone to install me a local USENET set of groups for my research team, using e.g.:
local.news
local.research
local.research.conferences
local.research.papers
local.research.ideas
local.research.conferences
local.research.experiments
local.research.datasets
local.research.tools
local.systems
local.social
local.teaching
local.admin
For a while, we had gopher, nntp, telnet, ftp, etc. but http/web ultimately provided a more general platform on which you could construct a wide variety of applications without needing to switch clients, removing friction and creating bridges.
What was Google's end game in acquiring DejaNews. Make way for "Google Groups". It's baffling. The comp.unix.* groups became less accessible for so many years, and perhaps inaccessible in some cases. Fixing accessibility problems was obviously low priority. Whatever their motives, Google indeed dumbed things down terribly.
I missed the heyday of Usenet by several years and instead landed right in the middle of the phpBB/InvisionBB/vBulletin era, but also made heavy use of RSS/Atom and was curious about other protocols, and so at one point played around with Usenet by way of the Panic client Unison[0].
It might've just been the client (though that'd be surprising, given Panic's knack for UI design) but I didn't find it any more intuitive than web forums. The ability to search numerous groups at once was nice though.
That's not to say that web forums were or are good however. They're a step above something like Discord at least because they're open, but forum search is notoriously bad and I've never come across forum software where navigation isn't somewhat clunky.
Web-based forums are objectively worse. The only thing they have working for them is that you can upload/include images. Otherwise, everything is terrible, beginning with their inability to hide stuff that you've already read. You have to wade in a sea of content every time you visit every forum.
Add to this the terrible usability (for example, you only see several posts in a thread, and then you have to find the tiny tiny numbers at the bottom to go to the next "page" of posts), we've really taken a huge step back.
Around this time a lot of them fell apart but niche ones (art, music, internet culture) were still alive and generally unspammy.
Well, there was a lot of fun in the chaos too. Stuff like alt.pave.the.earth had a culture around it.
There was serious stuff too, like alt.save.the.earth. Also things like alt.os.linux (later renamed to comp.os.linux)
The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995. The comp.* hierarchy was rather good and that's where the action was.
I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers simply copied the phpBB ideas because they've never seen anything better. So now we have to live with those "forums" where you can't find anything, and you have to wade through screenfuls of decoration just to see any content at all.
What was also really good was that you had a single interface for accessing multiple groups. That's something we lost: if I have multiple interests today, I have to register for multiple "boards/forums", each one with different software, and I have to go around and check them all for new posts. That quickly gets problematic and tedious if you are interested in more than two things.
I have a nagging feeling that we've dumbed things down terribly.