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?
You are correct but since 99.99% of people do not know what usenet is, it would be a pointless analogy. :) To be more specific than federation being like usenet: usenet was/is federated.
A couple years ago I was telling a 20something about usenet and I started to explain it the same way I always have: “It’s like an email discussion list—” but I was interrupted for a question: “what’s an email discussion list?” And this was a person who would describe themselves as geeky and good with computers. But has had no reason to interact with ancient techs like mailman. So first I had to explain what is an email list, which actually my friend thought sounded like a great idea. But having no experience of it, the ways in which usenet is an improvement were slightly lost.