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The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to be (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 11 months ago by Rapidcreek@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] spudwart@spudwart.com 25 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Well the issue with Usenet is the following:

Usenet is quite old
Usenet is not very well known.
Usenet has many barriers to entry.
Usenet groups have garnered an exclusionary reputation.
Other easier options have existed for a long time for basic social media interaction.

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Usenet also largely became a venue for bootlegging and porn -- and due to the nature of the protocol, companies hosting Usenet services didn't want to have to store all of that shit. After about 1995, you didn't go there for discussion anymore. Eternal September messed it up. Lemmy is fortunate that you can't really use it for file sharing, a few images notwithstanding, or the same thing would happen.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 3 points 11 months ago

and due to the nature of the protocol, companies hosting Usenet services didn't want to have to store all of that shit.

You can opt not to carry certain newsgroups, eg skipping alt.binaries.* would reduce your storage requirements drastically.

The fact of the matter is that people wanted something more "instant and accessible" than newsgroups that were synced overnight, and modern social media sprang from that desire.

[–] SeedyOne@lemm.ee 8 points 11 months ago

It should be emphasized, the above list is accurate for Social Interaction as the discussions and text have indeed waned. It does mention that at the end, but still.

For media sharing specifically, many of those above items are either trivial OR are actually what helps it thrive. Somehow, 30 years later, we're still under the radar and maxing out connection speeds without having to VPN, seed, share or dodge ISP rules and DMCA requests.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

Nntp is easy to set up and run.

There's a webUI and a forum front-end for nntp.

Nntp is as well-known as MC files (if you need to. You know).

An internal slack is as exclusive.

Email<->nntp gateways exist. What's easier than email ?