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.

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 ([email protected]), 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 fucking disrespectful. And in point of fact, I did like Usenet in its heyday.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.