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A comment on Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix. Parent comment

Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by SoftTalker on Thursday August 31, 2023 @12:34PM (#37339873)
It's been a while but I don't recall a ton of politics on the usenet groups I used to participate in (mostly tech subjects). Of course there were groups for politics, and sometimes a thread would go off on a tangent, but the nice thing about usenet is it was easy to killfile people or threads that you didn't want to read anymore.

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"

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by naravara on Thursday August 31, 2023 @05:15PM (#37343781)
The user was talking about internal group politics/drama. Not national electoral politics.
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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by dmacvicar on Thursday August 31, 2023 @05:17PM (#37343803)
Usenet was sorted by topic. Same people stick to the required topic in different forums.In the fediverse, you follow people, and therefore can't control very well what people post about. I follow some people because I am interested in technical topics, but I end muting some of those because some are very political, and I am not interested in some of these topics.

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).

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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by SoftTalker on Thursday August 31, 2023 @05:31PM (#37343938)
Hm. Wonder if any newsreaders could "follow" a person, regardless of the group he posted in. I don't recall that feature existing in rn or trn.
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Re:Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-on... by kalleboo on Friday September 01, 2023 @03:33AM (#37347813)
Lemmy is also built on ActivityPub as part of the Fediverse and is arranged into topics (called communities). E.g. you can follow [email protected] (or web interface https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/retrocomputing) and only see retrocomputing posts.

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).

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