USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix
Alive and still quite vigorous considering its age
One of the things that contributed to the downfall of USENET was when people worked out how to post binary files, encoded as multi-part blocks of ASCII text. It still has piracy problems but you can just ignore that stuff.
Ignore all the software pirates over there. Yes, sir, the ones sitting at the free bar full of top shelf liquor with strippers on each side. Yup, better not go over there.
In fact we'll provide you with a handy list of all of the places you should absolutely avoid. Indexed by interest and type even!
Oh no, we wouldn't want that to happen.
Want to make sure you don't accidentally download that new Mario movie? Definitely don't visit these files in order. Should you, accidentally, encounter something that looks like the Mario movie, simply check if it matches this sha256 sum. If it doesn't, you're still in the clear.
Stay safe out there, you upright citizen!
First and second rules exist for a reason.
These two rules caused Usenet to be abandoned by people who were once passionate about being part of the community, and instead taken over by spammers and bots.
Which first and second rules? Here on lemmy?
strippers? You mean the cocaine and hookers and cuban cigars, as well as all the blue label you can consume!
You should never go to usenet, you will see unbridled speed for nzb downloads, that are blindingly fast compared to that p2p stuff. Oh and actually 0-days the p2p sites get weeks later.
Back in the day I used to download the entirety of alt.music.indie (or whatever it was called) and spend weeks giving an honest listen to every album. I found so many artists through Usenet
it's interesting bullshit if the article author actually things that binaries were the problem. What ended the usenet was google groups providing a gateway to the usenet for people who had no idea what the usenet was. Lots of dumb users posting low quality content, and eventually bots spamming all relevant groups.
Binaries had been around forever, in dedicated newsgroups, and they most certainly did not contribute to the downfall of usenet, if anything, the opposite.
Absolutely. I tried getting back into Usenet a few years ago and it was like Yahoo Answers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Wait is there blackjack too?
My first ever internet contribution was a post to "alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die"
Hah!
I'm all for getting into old school tech, I even like to browse neocities.org on occasion just for the hit of nostalgia for the old web rings. I never got into newsgroups though, and I'm wondering what reasons you might use that instead of something like Lemmy, Mastodon etc?
Apart from the piracy side, I know all about that already lol
Because all the oldheads are there and they have a wealth of arcane and also useful knowledge you can’t find anywhere else
How fitting and wonderful that we manifest something truly like a fantasy world.
Oh, I’ve read of such problems, they’re ancient but still haunt some even now after the downfall of stackoverflow.
Are there known solutions or packages I can install?
Not amongst us or on these platforms. Nay perhaps not even on this protocol. Grey beards and 90s hackers you must seek, those whose craft comes from before the .com bubble and even Keanu Reeves. Many secrets they know that have since been lost and much of our ways do they shun.
Where can I find these hackers?
If they still wield their keyboards, you may find them in Newsgroups.
What URL will guide me the way?
Oh My child, URLs will not help you. You must learn to navigate the Usenet and its Newsgroups. Come, Drægōnëḏgelôṟḏ will show you the way.
Because although there are a lot of usenet clients, there is no Sync for usenet
Hey also. Gopher is also getting a bit of a hit, but mostly due to a new protocol someone came up with called Gemini. It's like Gopher a lot but has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
You can find out more about it here. I recommend Lagrange for your client. Two places I like to go to are Station (gemini://station.martinrue.com/) and Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/antenna/). BBS (gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) is also a new one on the scene.
And the nice thing about Lagrange is that it also supports the Finger protocol which basically is a way to read the .project or .plan file on a given user for the indicated system. Those files for those that never used them allowed a user to type a short status update into them that folks could then poll at any given time. Basically "ye olde status update".
There's a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/) and it works really well in Lagrange.
the .plan file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered
Heh.
[Gemini] has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
"Markup" would be a better term here. Markdown is a specific markup language which Gemini doesn't use.
See this? These are the comments I live for. You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
There’s a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/)...
That's neat! Thanks!
What's the cool thing to do there?
One cool thing is the game astrobotany, but Gemini shines in its focus on connecting through text only medium. Try midnight city for that.
(If you can't find URLs, ping me and I'll update the post)
Funnily enough I was toying with the idea of making a Gopher based Lemmy frontend for the lulz. Maybe Gemini then?
Wow thanks for this comment, Lagrange works incredibly well. I had a lot of fun trying out Gemini, I had been doing Gopher recently but Im definitely going to add this to my goofing around.
The fact that usenet has still hung on all this time as more than just a place for people to share pirated files is honestly impressive, and also is a pretty decent endorsement. Unfortunately it has a fair number of weaknesses, especially in terms of moderation tools and access these days, but ultimately a lot of what people want in a social media platform can be found on usenet. An effort to update it for modern sensibilities might actually create something pretty cool.
Lack of censorship tools is a strength.
"The truth is you love censorship, and so does everyone else. The only question is whether you’re ready to admit it."
https://gizmodo.com/why-censorship-is-part-of-everyday-life-section-230-1850095976
Maybe it's time to dig out and polish my NNTP client that I've written 30 years ago.
Now that's a 4 letter acronym I haven't seen for a while.
And it still works.
Isn't like 90% of the traffic on Usenet from alt.bin.*? In other words, file sharing. I've looked around some newsgroups, and most of them are just filled with spam posts
I mean with Streaming Services cutting down the Password-Sharing so that you need to pay multiple expensive services to get access and it's not convenient anymore with having to switch between them to find something to watch I'm not surprised that a piracy-heavy social network is thriving...
I remember ICQ
Uh oh!
I hear those words.
I tried to recover an ancient icq account but it looks like the company sold and nuked all the old accounts. Bummer, was hoping all my mid 90s friends might still be there.
Also changed protocol. Old UINs were, I think, usable for some time.
My ICQ UIN is only 7 digits
My sweet memory of an instant messenger not trying to fuck with you (lots of incoming messages were, though, but those were sometimes real people ; I actually know of people who met each other via ICQ contact directory and have a happy marriage ; don't think anything else has come close).
Other than that, it was just a better time. WCIII, Perfect World, WoW, Travian. Forum-based text roleplaying games (LOTR and HP). And ICQ as the way people would communicate, which would transcend interests fading, forums dying etc.
Pre-MS Skype was nice too, though.
I kinda want to do this and also go back to IRC. Some of my happier moments and interesting conversations were on IRC. My best friend who eventually became my husband was met on IRC. Good times.
The 20th anniversary of Steam made me think of the initial controversy over it on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games and I discovered some of the same people are still posting there.
We may yet be able to take back the internet. I've also seen people use IRC again/still. For actually other things than botnets.
Stupid question of the day does this compete with the fediverse or it goes along it? Not pointing fingers just curious.
It's the fediverse's great great grandpa.
It’s not a competitor, no.
Federation of usenet required either a peering link or scripting to pull down all new articles, it isn't automatically done, like Lemmy
Yeah that was its downfall really.. anyone could run a server, but getting actual stuff onto it, and getting your posts recognised, required peering, which required being on someone's good side. I remember setting up a server back in the day and searching for someone that would do peering, and it just wasn't happening unless I agreed to take everything which on my small connection just wasn't feasable.
Binary groups becoming piracy hubs didn't help either.. it meant most of the small groups that ran servers gave up as the data requirements got too large.
Seems like the committee is only like 3 people, so who knows how that'll go. It's no different then any other open-source ecosystem out there now, it needs to compete with them and gain developers and usable applications. It'll be an entirely new framework from scratch, so why would people pick their product over others? The only thing that remains original is the USENET brand.
It's still alive and kicking under the old framework though. Most ISPs dropped their news servers ages ago but there are still loads of free and subscription providers out there.
I don't know what this committee thinks it can accomplish that the fediverse hasn't already picked up the torch on, but power to them. The less centralized and more diverse the Internet is, the better.
They still have centralization in way though, as in the Big-8 has moderation powers regardless of what server is hosting. Though a server can probably patch that out.
I still think a Usenet like service would be brilliant and it's a shame there isn't a Lemmy-like service that has that.
To clarify, what I mean is decentralised infrastructure (you go onto the news server you want) with shared content (ie the same was that every Usenet post ends up on every Usenet server, if that server carries that newsgroup) - it gives all the advantages of federalisation (don't like your server, just go to another, you lose little or nothing) without the disadvantages of unintuitive discovery and fragmentation.
It's not text only if you have UUDecode.
I wonder if Sea Wasp is still posting on rasfw...
![[HN] Usenet, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/877b5e92-6da2-4a3b-b4b1-8de4a29f46c1.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)