Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by rjsw on Thursday August 31, 2023 @11:22AM (#37338614)

I have a few people in my killfile so that I don't see messages from them but don't get much spam in the comp.* groups that I read.

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.

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by mindcrime on Thursday August 31, 2023 @11:26AM (#37338709)

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.

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by tivert on Thursday August 31, 2023 @01:49PM (#37341069)

> CfP's

What's that stand for?

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by hkt on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:19PM (#37341552)

Call for Papers I'd guess

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by mindcrime on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:48PM (#37341977)

Yes, Call for Papers.

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by usrusr on Thursday August 31, 2023 @12:59PM (#37340296)

"Including this one" is a good example, for how the rules of how content is selected for presentation define the medium. Even with exactly the same people, exactly the same dang occasionally nudging people this way or that way, this place would be an entirely different if the effective feed composition wasn't the one it is. So much of the identity of these online communities is an emergent consequence of the mechanisms employed.

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by throwaway14356 on Thursday August 31, 2023 @03:10PM (#37342251)

i notice that a forum for a productive effort gets much less useful if there is a "general" sub form. It seems to ruin organization permanently.

One could in stead have a "i don't know where to put this" section that forces the mod to move or delete it.

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by usrusr on Friday September 01, 2023 @05:11PM (#37356230)

Then on the other hand, I know of some off topic situations that I consider very valuable, because any forum set up specifically for the topic in question would draw a very different audience.

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by jjav on Thursday August 31, 2023 @04:07PM (#37343006)

> 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.

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.

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