USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix
- Reference: 1693405627
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/08/30/usenet_revival/
- Source link:
USENET, or NetNews, is a text-only social discussions forum, or rather a set of a great many forums, called "newsgroups," carried by multiple servers around the world. Although the original developers [1]closed down their instance in 2010, that was just one server out of hundreds, and many are still running just fine. It never went away – it's still alive, you can get on it for free, and there is a choice of client apps for most OSes to help you navigate.
Although USENET is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network, the Big-8 board is the closest thing it has to a central governing authority. Board member [2]Tristan Miller told The Reg : " [3]Jason Evans and I [4]re-established the Board in 2020, after a long period of dormancy. We were joined a few months later by [5]Rayner Lucas ."
[6]
Among other things, the board manages the list of newsgroups, and now that there's an active board again, it has been busy. It deleted some very old groups at the moderators' request, and added the first new newsgroup in many years for [7]the Gemini protocol . If you have a News client, news:comp.infosystems.gemini ought to open it. The board has also revamped the website, run a Reddit [8]Ask Me Anything session , updated the [9]GNU Stump and WebStump packages used by moderators, and more.
[10]
[11]
USENET is older than the web, and works more like email: servers carry a list of newsgroups, and sync messages with each other. Although the original developers [12]closed down their instance in 2010, that was just one server out of hundreds.
(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 [13]has piracy problems but you can just ignore that stuff. It was also the venue for the [14]first spam message in internet history.)
[15]Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro
[16]Computer graphics pioneer John Warnock dies at 82
[17]Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail
[18]Founder of FreeDOS recounts the story so far, and the future
Getting online is pretty easy. Get an account on a USENET server. Install a client, tell it the server address. Download the list of groups, subscribe to some, and new messages get delivered to your client. That's it.
The Reg FOSS desk uses a service called [19]Eternal September , after the [20]event when AOL added USENET access to its internet client and tens of thousands of newbies flooded in without knowing the rules. We'll give you one hint: scrupulously follow the "netiquette" of [21]plain-text, bottom-posted email .
[22]
Eternal September only carries text groups, no binaries, but it offers totally free accounts, whereas some higher-capacity servers such as [23]Eweka or [24]Giganews charge for access.
As for a client – well, as we mentioned [25]when introducing their new ESR versions , we use Thunderbird. It's free, it works, and it runs on all the big desktop OSes. There are lots out there, though. Even [26]Google Groups is still alive, if woefully neglected.
As a big science fiction reader, this vulture enjoys dipping into rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.fandom . The computer history group alt.folklore.computers is still pretty busy. There is life in several retrocomputing channels, and we've been enjoying talking about Acorn RISC OS and Fortran among other things. ®
Get our [27]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/20/usenet_duke_server/
[2] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/User:Tristan_Miller
[3] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/User:Jason_Evans
[4] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Press_releases/2020-11
[5] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/User:Rayner_Lucas
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZO9nowr1ElK92yHRnUZMMAAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/27/gemini_protocol/
[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/nn4vp8/were_the_usenet_big8_management_board_ask_us/
[9] https://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/stump/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZO9nowr1ElK92yHRnUZMMAAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZO9nowr1ElK92yHRnUZMMAAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/20/usenet_duke_server/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/12/a_pair_of_usenet_pirates_get_66_months_behind_bars/
[14] https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/history-advertising-no-195-canter-siegels-green-card-spam/1441026
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/23/email_like_a_pro/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/21/john_warnock_obituary/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/new_betas_of_firefox_and_tbird/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/18/retro_tech_week_freedos/
[19] https://www.eternal-september.org/
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/23/email_like_a_pro/
[22] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZO9nowr1ElK92yHRnUZMMAAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[23] https://www.eweka.nl/en
[24] https://giganews.com/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/new_betas_of_firefox_and_tbird/
[26] https://groups.google.com/
[27] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: It never went away!
Yup. I still occasionally look at groups like uk.railway and uk.telecom.broadband.
I was going to say something about starting a gopher revival, but I see that it never went away either! OK then, Winsock API anyone?
A great way to waste morning tea time!
1984? Something like that. Type in 'rn' and then read every single new article from the world before your tea got cold!
As for media, the first one I remember was called "dirty.uue" and used a lot of cursor positioning commands for vt100 terminals and involved some text guy interfering with a lot of text animals. Ah, internet pron ain't what it used to be!
You may find that your ISP provides a newsgroup feed as part of your subscription, probably linking to Giganews.
I think the September bit of Eternal September came from annual influx of newbies who'd just arrived at college in the US and got their first internet connection. They would quickly absorb netiquette and things would quieten down till the next September. Then AOL arrived.
IRC
IRC killed Usenet. There I said it.
Re: IRC
IRC killed Usenet.
That's a bit like saying the telephone network killed snail mail.
Re: IRC
IRC and Usenet coexisted happily for quite some time. The use cases for each are broadly different, with IRC providing real-time but mostly ephemeral interactions across the Internet vs. the durable, asynchronous nature of Usenet. I think what crippled Usenet was that the gravity of Internet-based interaction gradually shifted to the Web. For most novice Internet users, the Web became a media-rich one-stop shop for interaction and content consumption, and my guess is that most people these days have never even heard of Usenet.
Telehack still has gopher and usenet
If people are interested, Telehack, over at www.telehack.com, has gopher and usenet.
sudo apt install slrn
Must admit it's been years since I last browsed USENET.
Quite a nostalgia trip just listing the groups again. comp.lang.c, rec.arts.sf.tv,babylon5, alt.music.enya, ...
Not as bereft of life as I expected, but not exactly about to nuzzle up to the bars, bend 'em apart with its beak, and VOOM.
Re: sudo apt install slrn
> Not as bereft of life as I expected, but not exactly about to nuzzle up to the bars
Depends. Some groups are still pretty active (say on average 50 messages/day), others half-sleeping and still others smell like a dead mouse.
And in keeping with the ripe old age of USENET I still use it with a reader almost as old... the good ol' Forte Agent which runs beautifully in my Windows VM. (Agent is one of a smallish number of apps I still run in a VM as I've simply found nothing I like as much that'll run under Linux (or perhaps because I am too lazy to convert all the killfile rules). Others in that select group are foobar2k, Poptray and a couple of graphics programs.)
slrn for me
Nice threaded newsreader for command line unix systems.
Also, just about every mailing list is available via Usenet too, which is handy. (news.gmane.io)
Pine and ... Outlook Express?
Pine was my favorite text-based newsgroup reader (basic, I know). Later, when I came to appreciate GUI clients, I used Gravity and then discovered that Outlook Express had a surprisingly capable newsgroup client built in, which made it good for downloading ... uh ... cat pictures from the alt.binaries groups.
It never went away!
I've been using it since I first heard about it in the early 1990s, although the number of groups I'm on has dwinded somewhat.