Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all.
Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they are about to make, but I'm yet to find an alternative where I could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane support. I don't see how usenet can bring all of that all of a sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a social media addict.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
Free access to text only groups: http://www.eternal-september.org/
Pick a newsreader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders and go take a look.
Technically yes. Become widely adopted, maybe if...
There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed message header/footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the transport/storage but they all need some tender loving care.
In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide them a UI/UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this.
Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles. I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble/Murmur for voice.
I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator.
And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever.
But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators.
I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don't really care.
I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning.
I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?
I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet.
Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that's actually a problem IMO.
Unless someone moderates.
Then you have Reddit, ie the need to fund moderation.
Or a corner case where there are volunteers.
And besides users will want tags and private messages and the ability to follow personalities and avatars and such.
None of which addresses zero latency for the first child porn. Remember how common it was for ISP’s to block everything starting with “alt” ?
Yes it was fun while it lasted but it wasn’t AOL that killed it. It was ubiquitous bandwidth improvements worldwide.
Tilde operates one, as does SDF, the two *nix communities that I belong to.
(SDF is member only access)
Duh. Have you learned nothing of the tech cycle?
That, and the the whole question of who's going to pay for a large amount of usenet traffic. Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub...
NNTP was a massive quasi-distributed forum (I wasn’t the newsmaster at the ISPs I worked at, but frequently dealt with the servers and setups) and a pretty big overhead resource and management-wise, but pretty interesting to deal with until it was overwhelmed by binaries groups and all sorts of weirdness.
I do miss the quirky sense of humor and the community - somewhat like Mastodon, for those who are leaving Twitter - but I don’t miss the drama, the flooding and the flame wars.
Log in -> set preferences -> surf reddits with www. urls like normal.
Look at migrations to Mastodon and Matrix. It's still niche. It's great for that niche, but it's not something the average user will understand.
Users care about UX, quality of life. This argument isn't grounded in that.
What I do like about reddit. It is still one place where you just use an email address and nick name. So you can be anonymous. Or reasonable anonymous. No one looking back 10 years back into your posts to cancel you for something you said that in that time maybe was not an issue.
I was so reluctant making a Facebook account back in the day because they wanted your REAL identity. Man I was a nickname on irc or on the internet in general. That was what I loved about it.
Usenet was the same you could just use throw away email account and just say whatever. Ask whatever without being scared.
Reddit is the only place where you still can do that.
I also wrote a minimal web frontend.
Example: https://campaignwiki.org/news Source: https://metacpan.org/dist/App-news
well, there you go, NNTP still exists.
write some ios/android NNTP clients that can handle multiple servers w/credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to distribute the posts to other servers.
99% of posts are a desperate grab for attention. Every comment is one of:
- a smug, know it all response by someone who thinks they are an expert in some field rather than a loser who spends their day on reddit
- an attempt to be witty
- some reddit saying that gets repeated over and over ("man got that dawg in him" and so on)
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...>
1. It got spammed to death.
2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.
4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.
All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 & 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated / moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging / forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others).
There've been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most noteably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is extremely fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way).
Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it's attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these.
Reddit's has still fallen flat on the second point, and fails further in many people's view (my own included) in that it simply isn't a very good discussion forum. There are small and limited spaces that work, sometimes. But even moderately large subreddits are a hot mess, and the very largest could have the late Newt Minow's classic phrase applied.
As for Usenet, it's a cautionary tale that open protocols and federated control are no guarantee of either effectiveness or continuity.
/me side-eyes Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Edit: To clarify, I'm wondering how extensive the non-google archives are.
[1] As in not google
It is described at https://rational.app
Easier to build something new than to tack on more cruft to the broken usenet model. At this point usenet has little remaining use other than being a low-profile warez distribution channel. It was great in the late 80s and early 90s but does not scale well as a communications medium and we already know better ways to manage the distributed data sharing layer.
Thunderbird still supports NNTP.