So I’ve finally been doing my little reddit/twitter migration against my better judgement (my better judgement would say to take the opportunity to get off the internet but who listens to that loser). I’m finding all these platforms interesting, I particularly like how kbin combines both formats and links up to Mastodon, that’s quite an idea.
Having said that all this nonsense made me nostalgic for Usenet all over again. I had some very enjoyable years on there and quite a lot of what I liked about Reddit was actually that it felt like the closest thing the web had to Usenet. (You’d think Google Groups was the closest thing but for some reason it wasn’t. There is something I just loved about a newsreader’s interface that Google Groups didn’t replicate and it was just annoying).
It actually made me go check some old newsgroups out, and, well, that’s the eternal problem Usenet isn’t it - it being 99% dead as a parrot.
Is anybody still on Usenet, and if so what newsgroups do you follow? For that matter, what newsgroups are you aware of as still having some activity? Is anybody interested in getting (back) on it, and if so on where? Is Google Groups still in 2023 the best the web has to offer in terms of accessing it easily?
Usenet was the first time I interacted with the internet as it was the only thing accessible from the Unix lab we had access to (email was available but we didn’t use it). This was 1994. I was on alt.music.pink-floyd during the height of the PUBLIUS ENIGMA puzzle.
I kept using it up into the early 2000s. I’d jump on in the morning before going to work, and that’s how I found out about 9/11 (it was 12:46am NZ time when the first tower was hit). I had gone to our local newsgroup for our city and there were messages in all caps “TOWER COLLAPSED” and then “BOTH TOWERS DOWN”. I wondered what was going on, then turned on the TV where our main channel was feeding in the live news (I think it was CNN). We just sat there horrified, watching before we eventually went off to work.
I eventually stopped using it when web forums and other sites took over for me (fark, slashdot, metafilter) and then my ISP dropped support for it. Google Groups didn’t mesh with me and I never went back.
When I first jumped on here and got my head around federation, it took me back to those Usenet days because in a sense this is almost the same. I’ve seen lots of people say “federation is like email”, but to me it’s like Usenet.
It is a lot like Usenet, but Usenet has some superior features.
Discussion groups are automatically merged across all servers. So it is decentralized but does not feel decentralized.
Newreaders only show you content that you have not already read/seen
Readers let you kill articles in subscribed newsgroups and threads within subscribed newsgroup articles so that you don’t see them in the future.
The more I’m remembering and re-experiencing Usenet the more it reminds me of the huge differences between it and web interfaces that contribute to it being difficult to adapt but also having its own strengths.
A huge under-appreciated difference I think is that because all the messages are essentially email and you’re meant to read them in an email client, and the threading isn’t inherent it’s the email client trying to figure out what’s a reply to what, and the message titles are displayed in a thread with a separate window for message content, you get:
infinitely long threads
the custom of copying the post that’s being replied to & replying at the bottom or inline, with further customs around trimming etiquette
because the message is displayed in a separate window from the thread with its own scrollbar there is very little limit on post size other than custom (and I assume some client or server-related limit I’ve never run into, and I’m amazing at running into comment length limits on forums. Like, once I saw some apparently longtime Reddit user go “TIL there’s a 10000 character limit on comments” and I just went “how did you not know that I run into it twice a week”)
I think those things are what I truly love about Usenet as a forum interface. And I think they’re very very hard to replicate on a webpage where everything is on the same page. Most other forums are linear instead of threaded; that’s why I like Reddit so much I think! But even then there is obviously a cost in terms of page real estate to having excessively long threads, which Reddit manages in various ways. And either way, when the messages are on the same page as the tree structure then that’s an extra limit on the size of both. I think that was a big part of the issue with Google Groups, although it did perform those tasks well enough that the newsgroup was useable you always got the sense they didn’t want to. Like, there’s a tree view but it isn’t default I think? And it wasn’t great at displaying really long threads? IIRC it struggled with the quotation formats too, maybe top-posted by default. I’d have to go back to remember. I wasn’t around for DejaNews so I don’t know how they did it, other than that everybody seemed to like it.
Publius! 😂
Oh man. Sitting in the Unix lab, looking to see if there were more clues…
Name vaguely rings a bell, please expand
It was a weird publicity stunt that coincided with the release of Pink Floyd’s Division Bell album and started on usenet. There were vague hints of a mystery in the album and maybe a prize. It was quite ahead of it’s time.