This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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!
I would hate for people to see this index of places with potentially illegal content. The temptation is just too high. I'll gladly guard it from innocent users with you. My eyes and heart are ready to protect the realm.
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.
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.
Wait is there blackjack too?
My first ever internet contribution was a post to "alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die"
Hah!
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.
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.
Are you one of the wizards of yore? The ones who were there when the old magic was written?
In a way. Gobelin was my NNTP client, and Connector was my client for multiplayer games. I did some more work back then, like writing our companies' SMPT gateway. Ah, those were the days...
Is there a "usenet for dummies" guide somewhere, for 90s kids?
Asking for a friend.
It's quite easy, but you'll need an account and a client.
Ask me if you have a question!
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.
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.
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 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.
So many good memories on IRC. I miss it so much. Discord just isn't the same.
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
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.
It's not text only if you have UUDecode.
No offense to the fediverse, but I think usenet was first
