I met my first girlfriend on Usenet back in the mid-90s. She sent me a mixtape I still have and her writing Bush(x) next to some of the Bush songs confused me for many years. Lots of college-aged people were around Usenet for help, advice and just listen to me. Same goes for IRC. I don't know if I'd be here if it wasn't for the online mentorship of slightly older strangers keeping me going until I found IRL friends and graduated from the internet.
Anyhow, Google should release the original DejaNews archive to the public minus whatever posts people have told them to remove over the years. I've been told it arrived there on a handful of DVDs, so it's not exactly a lot of data in 2024.
Usenet is not controlled by a big corporation, that is what threatens its existence.
You didn't need Meta or X or Instagram to exchange information. Algorithms didn't decide what you get to see or not. You weren't forced to consume large amounts of ads and you weren't tracked. This is very bad! :)
Can we, somehow, revive Usenet or build a better version of it?
People are working on this. In particular Retro Guy has one very good web front end that is really the only viable replacement for Google Groups at this point. Look for Rocksolid Light (rslight) on gitlab.
It has a retro look on purpose. There are several themes included and it is really easy to create a new theme CSS file.
You can run a peer to carry text groups on a raspberry pi or a cheap VPS. Visit the rocksolid.* hierarchy on Usenet if you have questions about running a peer. Please don't ask questions about Rocksolid here on HN, as that would not benefit the people learning in the newsgroups.
Disclosure: I am not the maintainer of Rocksolid Light and I am not promoting my own product. I just like the software and I think the maintainer has the right ideas and right attitude of retro-styled usability in his project.
I tried Lemmy for a bit and found it to be nothing more than a tiny Reddit clone. And I don't mean just the software aspect of it, rather the content and moderation.
Reddit recreated the social structure of Usenet. Shared infrastructure, but the subreddits managed themselves. Topics, threads... all similar to Usenet. Better multimedia support, of course.
Even the phenomenon of anonymous posters (because accounts didn't require an email for a long time), flames, crossposting... all very like usenet.
Usenet preceded modern social media so the current discussions about who owns content didn't apply.
Reddit was remarkably open in the beginning. Anon accounts, light moderation, open API... it's when they decided to try to extract more value that it became really shitty.
Discoverability and fragmentation seem to be the problems on Lemmy. Groups are small (not really a problem, the smaller subreddits with active and engaged people are better IMHO) but it's really difficult and high-effort for groups to form. Reddit did seem to have that part working well. I think people have gone into Discord (which sucks/I cannot stand).
I stopped using Usenet a long time ago but the Google Usenet archive has posts of mine from the 90s that are not in Henry Spencer’s archive. Is someone’s backing up Google’s archive or should I start scraping their pages to have a backup?
uk.railway archives from that collection only go back into the early 2000s, whereas I know Google had posts going back into the 90s. (But unfortunately Google is currently blocking access on account of too much spam, maybe facilitated by Google Groups in the first place…)
I’ve heard of Usenet, but never used it. It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents, but I don’t get the vibe that’s the primary use case.
What can I do with Usenet?
The internet has become so boring, I’d be open to exploring something else, but I’ve got no idea what Usenet is.
Usetnet was (technically still is) essentially decentralized text-only reddit, with an open protocol and a client you can choose. You can post/read on a global network. The problem is that very few groups are still active and probably dying.
Back in the day ISPs would give you an email account, some static web space accessible via FTP and access to the local NNTP (usenet) server as standard, which is why it was popular. usenet servers were peered with each other, sharing a large global namespace (servers could have local-only groups too, but that's a detail).
At the beginning, most of the online discussions happened there.
As open-source development grew, the main issue was that creating and getting approval for a group was bureaucratic/complicated and slow. As this was global and automatically peered, there was also a "minimum" number of requests to be eligible. For this reason, small groups started to move to mailing lists instead which didn't require special approval and became the new de-facto standard.
For a long time, bi-directional nntp<>mailing list software was standard for large lists. nntp clients were always designed to work with huge amount of messages efficiently compared to mail clients. I was following hundreds of groups at the time, and I still consider nntp fantastic from the user perspective.
Spam and trolls were another problem with such a public global network. Policing was hard. This is just a very short summary (it ignores completely the problem of piracy/warez and the binary split..)
I'm open to correction, but I believe it's essentially a bunch of email lists. You can post to rec.games.roguelike.angband, your message will go to a server somewhere (theoretically, to every Usenet provider), and people who want to discuss, or read discussion of, Angband, can ask that server for the set of messages associated with rec.games.roguelike.angband.
So email, if you sent mail to topics rather than to recipients.
I've always assumed (never looked into it) that the protocol itself has little in common with SMTP. But the constraints of text-only messages (email before html formatting took hold), email address as user ID and client software that used the same UI for both (Netscape Navigator!) certainly made it feel like very much the same thing. Mailing lists, but more federated than irc.
One difference to mailing lists of more recent times, besides technological differences, is that there was more of a sense of shared culture across groups. Groups certainly differed (some topics might have even had parallel groups in regular and in alt.* hierarchies?), but not even remotely as much as mailing lists differ. Certainly more free for all babble (because it was) than the more moderated or even announcement-only end of the mailing list spectrum that is enabled by their centralised nature.
Usenet runs on the NNTP protocol. NNTP stands for "Network News Transfer Protocol." It is not a mailing list but many mailing list operators mirror their mailing lists in a NNTP newsgroup. This is done with a mail-to-news gateway script.
Usenet is typically accessed with a news reader application like Thunderbird. Thunderbird is not just a email client. It is also a news client that allows you to subscribe to and post to newsgroups.
You can enjoy threaded discussion in unmoderated groups without worrying about viewpoint censorship.
You can run your own NNTP peer and create your own newsgroups for your own community.
You can use a threaded newsreader application (like Thunderbird or Seamonkey or Claws Mail) which is much more efficient and organized than web forums.
It was big in the 90s. Well, 'big'. Before we had forums. You can think of it like public email. You got access through a usenet server, often provided by your ISP or University, and it had groups for more or less everything going. Servers would peer the data between them, though server admins would often have a whitelist of groups that they would replicate.
Images were transferred on it much like embedded email images now - as uuencoded text. Base64 probably came in at some point, but you get the picture. There wasn't a lot in the way of video back then, few people had the bandwidth.
Groups had etiquette but I'm not sure how/if it could be enforced. The ultimate sanction was to put someone in your ignore file, and then you wouldn't see them any more.
Old usenet was largely inhabited by tech enthusiasts, students and academics. It is the place where flame-wars and trolling originated.
Two things killed the old usenet experience.
First there was the tradition of people who didn't know the etiquette flooding in every September with the new academic year. They would learn and participate better and settle in over a short while and order would be restored. When AOL gave newsgroup access, it was referred to as the September that never ended, and marked a downturn in the quality of discussion.
Second was spammers figuring out they could just flood the place, and so the merrily did, until it was basically useless and impossible to find actual conversation.
> It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents
Yeah so in the old binaries groups you could split videos over huge numbers of individual messages, tied together with identifiers in the titles, then reconstruct them. By the mid 00s this seemed to be the main use of usenet.
A file containing all of the message ids for a particular binary was called an 'nzb' and you could use that to grab the binary if you had a newsgroup server subscription and a program like sabnzbd. By that point most ISPs didn't give access to usenet any more, so you went through a third party. You could run a sort of trawler thing on groups you liked to build nzbs yourself, which used a lot of time and data, or you could subscribe to an nzb service. These survived for a while because a) fewer people used them and b) they made the same arguments as trackers - there's no content here, it's just an index.
'scene' videos would often get to usenet first, in fact usenet was often the source of the binaries which then made their way to the torrent services AFAICT.
For the casual consumer of pirated material it was probably legally safer than torrenting as you never uploaded anything.
Yeah fair enough, they were/are the beating heart of the scene. I always assumed usenet was somehow 'closer' to the source than the public trackers, but :shrug:
even twenty years after shutdown of the one I was ... hrm ... helping with ... I am reluctant to talk so please read https://www.wired.com/2005/01/topsite/ instead
In case you haven't noticed, the submitted link takes you to the web interface for a subset of groups on a personal usenet server, and it has some guides on using it.
The title could be misconstrued that Google groups is going to be discontinued. It won't be for a long time, simply because Google heavily relies on it internally.
They killed Google Code in 2016, and Google Code Search in 2012. Internally those types of products still exist, just not for public use. I see no reason Google groups could not also be killed for any public use.
I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. As far as I understand the internally available equivalents are entirely different products than what was publicly available, and have never been made public themselves.
Wait. I'm confused. Google Groups was still interfacing with the Usenet? In a way that one could post to Usenet via Google Groups? I never knew that! I thought they were only hosting a read-only archive based on what they acquired with DejaNews. And I seem to recall a post about that having been discontinued... So this was somehow secretly all still alive? Damn.
Open mailing lists often have public archives, for example https://www.mail-archive.com/. Many lists are subscribed to multiple public archives.
Those archives are often searchable on their own platforms, and are indexed by regular search engines too.
Now about mailing lists created using the google "groups" platform itself, is a different story. Does google index it's own group archives? No idea. Those were _already_ horrible to look at before and I've subscribed most of the ones I follow to other public archives to get something usable.
Traditionally if you're subscribed to a mailing list you'd basically have your own local archive of it and use your email client for search. If you wanted to incorporate messages from before you joined the list, you'd ask some old-timer to send you their mbox archive.
Public/centralized archives as the sibling notes became common at some point, though usability is generally worse than with an email client (at least the power-user ones).
Anyhow, Google should release the original DejaNews archive to the public minus whatever posts people have told them to remove over the years. I've been told it arrived there on a handful of DVDs, so it's not exactly a lot of data in 2024.