Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn&#x27;t &quot;free&quot; like Twitter and Facebook are. (They&#x27;re free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don&#x27;t pay a monthly subscription to them). <i>Way</i> back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren&#x27;t creating a lot of load on your ISP. Even then, the NNTP server didn&#x27;t carry much content, wasn&#x27;t well maintained, didn&#x27;t save much, so you had to pay <i>more</i> for a third-party server if you wanted to participate.<p>My hope for Usenet back in the day was a fully decentralized implementation that would allow each Usenet client to act as a client as well as a mini-server to cut the middleman out. Freenet (and I2P, I think) was sort of based on this idea at a very high level, but went in sort of a weird way (and didn&#x27;t build on NNTP either).

Any of you archivers out there know whatever became of the Deja News Archive after Google bought it?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2001&#x2F;02&#x2F;google-buys-deja-archive&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2001&#x2F;02&#x2F;google-buys-deja-archive&#x2F;</a><p>This was integrated into Google seearch, it worked great for many years, and then it seems Google slowly chipped away at access to the archive and now it all but gone.<p>I know about the various Usenet archives on archive.org (utzoo (rip), some CD usenet archive), but I want that Deja archive!

I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it&#x27;s mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they&#x27;re still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I&#x27;m aware of.<p>Usenet clients gave their users so much power, it&#x27;s almost criminal that modern news readers have yet to catch up to them several decades later.

Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again. With buzz about moving to Mastodon, I was just thinking about why usenet couldn&#x27;t be a viable social media platform as it represents so much of what people like about the fediverse, and then some. It would be fascinating to see the usenet protocol repurposed and new clients and newsgroups built upon lessons from the past decade.

Google in many ways helped sink USENET by acquiring Dejanews, then slowly replacing the USENET functionality with Google News. Dejanews, in hindsight could have been a pretty reasonable proto-social network on its own.<p>Not that I&#x27;m bitter...

Some of the most interesting and intellectually interesting conversations I have every had online were on USENET back in the 80&#x27;s. I literally made friends all over the world in fields spanning areas from model aircraft to electronics, software development and aerospace. Met a bunch of them. Visited each others&#x27; homes. Etc.<p>Today? Geez. No comment. Every meaningful relationship I have online is from people I knew and met in real life, some of them a decade or more ago.

&gt; Killfiles and Scorefiles<p>That&#x27;s one of the most important thing most people ignore: they means we can have our PERSONAL aggregator instead of using someone else algorithms and censorship. Sure at usenet time (or back at Xerox time where these concept was implemented for the first time in known history) the level of scoring and self-censoring technique was limited but nowadays it&#x27;s a CENTRAL point. Usenet is a decentralized network no one own, no one can really censor at a whole and aggregators who are needed for anything high volumes are personal things, posts can be archived locally so they do not disappear and so on.<p>Coupled and integrated (like Gnus offer) with RSS feeds mails and in the case of Gnus also HN (nnhackernews backend) or Reddit (nnreddit) we can have a CONSISTENT and LOCAL UIs for ALL our public information&#x2F;communication infra in a robust yet simple manner. That&#x27;s the classic nuclear war resilient internet vs the modern centralized and censored web.<p>Oh BTW usenet today it&#x27;s almost abandoned, but some have rediscovered it for mostly piracy as an alternative to bittorrent. It&#x27;s relevant because it means that while normally binary groups in a modern world are a bit odd they perform well enough for such big file sharing usage.<p>Or, long story short: evolving these tools we can have a modern classic desktop who happen to be a human PERSONAL exobrain, work desk, tool, with the human at the center. With the modern web and relevant WebVMs we get instead modern dumb terminals of modern mainframes.<p>Do you prefer owning nothing &quot;and being happy&quot; like the infamous WEF&#x2F;2030 video OR you prefer own your small slice of the world peer between peers?

It&#x27;s a bit strange how this article applies the past tense. Gnus still works fine, can be used to read mail, and despite some questionable design decisions such as line-based .overview files, can handle quite a bit of mail with its nnml backend. I don&#x27;t use that much of Gnus functionality actually, but the threading, disappearance of messages I have read, and the ability to score down the occasional high-noise thread is well worth it. I cursed a lot when we switched to Gmail at work and the auto-creation of mailing list folders no longer worked (it&#x27;s no longer predictable if list mail has a List-Id: header due to internal Gmail deduplication), but I found a reasonable solution to that as well (which I probably should write up and post somewhere).<p>Some even gate mailing list mail into a news server like INN so that they can keep using their favorite newsreader. Thankfulyl, with Gnus, that isn&#x27;t necessary.

I feel like there is way more talk now in general about the current broken state of the Internet, corporatized and designed to inflict productivity-destroying scatter brain on all of us.<p>I started to aggressively use newsletters and digests of all sorts, for one. Politics, technology, what to stream. It is a SUCH better experience and a time saver.

How was poster identity handled in Usenet&#x2F;NNTP? From what I remember, it was just a &quot;From:&quot; header and spoofing was easy. Or was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their local server which require auth, you could see which server the message originated from and decide if the sender&#x27;s address matched the server address...? It&#x27;s been so long.)<p>If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a somewhat strong notion of identity.

I think these are very valid thoughts, even today. I loved the old days of telnet &amp; Pine, and then Netscape Navigator with built-in email &amp; newsgroups. Even Outlook Express did a decent job with NNTP.<p>but the endless flood of spam was too much, along with the ever growing risk of &quot;illegal content.&quot; Just became way too risky, ISPs started dropping it, and the spiral continued.

&gt; My opinion of conversation views is that they became widespread because they are relatively easy to implement, and because the threaded interfaces in early 2000s graphical email clients were terrible.<p>No, it seems more likely that it&#x27;s because they&#x27;re easier to display on mobile, so mobile first design leads to using them everywhere.

I seem to remember one reason usenet worked so well was the pretty stringent insistence on good netiquette. Of course it wasn&#x27;t foolproof, but nearly all people wanted to follow the implied rules most of the time.<p>Todays internet demographics and social media landscape though probably makes Eternal September pale into insignificance.

Anybody have any modern recommendations for file sharing on usenet? I have heard there are a lot of obscure stuff still there that you will not find anywhere else (not even specifically talking about pirating here - legal stuff as well)

&gt; Do you see how different this was from the infinite scroll of current social media web sites and apps? The idea was that your newsfeed would be updated periodically. Maybe hourly, maybe only once a day. And the goal of your newsreader was to let you be caught up and finished before the next time it updated.<p>How is that desirable? Why would you want to finish reading something that might already be obsolete?

He&#x27;s spot on about the quality of clients for social feeds. Tweetbot is the only way I use Twitter. Cuts out all the algorithmic manipulation of my feed and has excellent controls to allow me to parse my feed and weed out the garbage. There are many tech people I wouldn&#x27;t be able to follow if I wasn&#x27;t able to strip out the political garbage.

Usenet worked until the demographic changed.

Anyone looking to create a new social network should certainly take cues from Usenet - of course, it was eventually over taken by forums on the web.<p>Visiting Usenet today though will only lead to sadness, unless you&#x27;re looking for something you shouldn&#x27;t be or enjoy endless spam.

In addition to the `trn` and Gnus readers that the article mentions, another great one was `strn`.<p>They were much more powerful than any other forum interface I&#x27;ve seen since. Though the very compact thread views like in `old.reddit.com` and HN are nice.

The timeliness of this article is that it compares Usenet to Mastodon.

nn[1] commands are still like muscle memory 20 years after I stopped using it.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nndev.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nndev.org</a>

Usenet sounds great! Is it actively used still?

2018