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?
I’ve only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands “minecraft” to be an adjective meaning “that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic”, it’s adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.
Maybe it’s time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age