Pretty much the question. I heard about Usenet a while back but never managed to wrap my head around it.
It’s funny seeing this thread with it’s descriptions written as if describing the traditions of some long-gone ancient civilization.
Which part of that isn’t true
I mean it’s… checks math… over 30 years old. That is ancient in technology timeline.
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It’s an old federated message board system. Message boards are called “newsgroups “. It predates the web so it’s usually accessed via a special client app. To use it you’d need:
- A Usenet client app, called a newsreader. See Wikipedia. Many are probably abandoned by now.
- An account with a Usenet provider. A search engine will point you to several options. There used to be some free ones. If there still are, it would be a good way to try it out. But note that the free ones often don’t carry all of the newsgroups — they omit the binary groups, which are known to carry pirated software and, let’s say, diverse video content.
It’s federated? Okay, that makes a lot more sense. I thought usenet providers were like isps, connecting to a single, central host or something. I didn’t realize they were federated systems.
It’s really neat to think of Usenet as ‘federated’ considering that’s a new term for most of us.
My preferred options are: Binsearch, astraweb, and newsbin
You get what you pay for, a bargain IMHO
Check out FidoNet for another example of federation.
If I recall correctly, ISPs were often running their own Usenet servers. This meant that traffic didn’t leave their networks and thus they paid less network interchange fees.
These days maybe only niche ISPs in some parts of the world might be running Usenet servers. Majority of them are run by specific companies created specifically for the purpose.
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Heh. I used to run leafnode as my own, in house, single person server.
I’m quite surprised to find out it’s still alive and maintained.
I’d add to this and say you need:
A Usenet client such as SabNZBD (like qbittorrent or similar downloading client, but for Usenet)
A Usenet provider such as Astraweb, Newshosting, UsenetServer, Easynews, etc (or a paid subscription giving you access to a number of servers, kind of like a private torrent site)
And a tracker or indexer such as NZBGeek, NZB Finder, omgwtfnzbs, DrunkenSlug, etc (similar to a library index that helps you find what you want in the sea of information)
You can set services like these up with programs that use these tools to pull what you want automatically, such as the Arrs (Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, etc) or you can manually search either the provider directly through their own search engine, or through an indexer’s refined search engine.
Get a free account from https://www.eternal-september.org/.
Then in the desktop version of Thunderbird , “Add a newsgroup account” with your login details from eternal september.
Find some groups to subscribe to. Try comp.lang.python for example. Once you subscribe you can see the posts inside it.
You’ll probably see lots of spam. To remove the spam you need to use Thunderbirds Message Filters functionality - remove all messages where their Message-ID header contains “googlegroups”.
Not having any experience with this I find it hilarious that most of the spam comes from googlegroups
Heh, yeah.
Google does a great job stopping spam in Gmail so they could stop it if they wanted but… Just haven’t. Super lame.
I’m just amazed they haven’t shut down Google groups by now…
Someone made the calculation that the data harvested for advertisers is more valuable than the hosting/maintenance expense they would recoup by killing it. Plus it’s tasty food for Bard.
Usenet is a decades-old distributed message sharing system. It’s like an old school message board. To access it, you need a newsreader. Mozilla Thunderbird is one such example.
I have not accessed newsgroups in several years, so I don’t know how active it is today. But it used to be the go-to source for “warez” and bootleg media and porn. Oh yeah, and discussions threads on myriad topics. :)
Slashdot, digg, Reddit, lemmy, 4chan, etc. are all spiritual descendents of usenet.
The software tech for usenet is old, slow, and has a learning curve. You might find it frustrating to navigate and use. However, modern newsreaders probably hide some of the complexity.
Usenet has its own protocol (NNTP) where digests of messages get passed from server to server, eventually making it out to all (or most) servers that host a particular group (like alt, sys, gov, etc.). In essence, it’s a federated digital bulletin board of bulletin boards. Many servers don’t participate in some groups such as alt.binary.*.
Usenet pre-dates the world wide web, and even pre-dates Gopher. It was designed such that a Usenet server could spend most of its time disconnected from the Internet and accumulate local posts that would then be federated in a digest when the server dialed up and connected to other servers.
The main NNTP network eventually made its way to a centralized web-accessible service and most places that used to provide an NNTP server (which was most ISPs in the 90s) eventually shut their servers down and only provided gateway and email services.
The protocol still exists though, and there’s still a small connected network.
In reality, Lemmy is the spiritual descendant of Usenet.
It was designed such that a Usenet server could spend most of its time disconnected from the Internet and accumulate local posts that would then be federated in a digest when the server dialed up and connected to other servers.
…Would this have been local posts of an individual, or sometimes a group in a LAN or something? The way you describe it here puts me in the mind of recent stuff like Scuttlebutt, albeit that’s more clearly individual-focused.
What’s scuttlebutt?
And no, not individual and not LAN. WAN. A Usenet server could easily service hundreds of folks if not thousands. It would collect all their posts and then aggregate upwards.
This gives a brief overview of Scuttlebutt with a link to a more technical breakdown.
That said, I remain confused by the other person’s description, as I’m not sure how it’s accumulating posts while “disconnected from the Internet”. I follow how it works when connected, but not so much how it would work as they’ve described it, at least in the disconnected circumstances, unless it’s sorta how I asked.
The Internet is a network of networks. Nowadays, everyone tends to have always-on connections to the entire thing, but back in the day, many of the networks spent a lot of time disconnected from each other. Usenet was designed to mostly transparently handle this by the local network having an aggregating server that would collect all the local activity and share it with other Usenet servers when it could reach them.
Remember that even the local activity was people connecting with teletype terminals and dialing up over modems from remote systems. Long distance trunking fees were a big deal, and Internet routing had to deal with the possibility that there was currently no route to the destination address.
Thanks for clarifying! So it does work roughly as I was thinking, that’s cool!
You can subscribe to Easynews. It’s Usenet turned into a website. There’s a built in search engine (supports regular expressions), retention going back to 2008, spam and malware filtering, and multiple servers located in the US and Europe. You choose whether to use the web or a Usenet client. Probably the easiest way to use this neglected corner of the Internet.
Even Usenet gets censored, but there a window of a couple days between posting and takedown where the file is available. We see this a lot with major studios who pay investigators to identify infringing material. To get around this, some uploaders are encrypting their content, and you’ll need the description key.
Usenet used to be freely available through most ISPs. But now, even though there are still a lot of usenet groups active for discussion, it is also used for file “sharing”. So hosting Usenet groups can be very data intensive, and ISPs stopped hosting them.
Google hosts a free portal into usenet at groups.google.com , but I just went there and saw that even they decided it’s too much trouble and will be stopping soon.
There are a few subscription based usenet servers, they vary from $5 to $10 a month. Easynews.com , giganews.com are two that seem to still be open.
Yeah Google bought a really great thing and ran it for a very long time as their own version of stackoverflow. I bet stackoverflow was a response to Google’s monopoly on groups answering questions.
I think Stack Overflow was a response to Experts Exchange which teased you with a question but you had to buy a subscription for the answer. Subscribers would answer questions and pay for the privilege of providing that site with content.
Nice little history there. Fuck EE.
BTW, OP and others… Incredible Doom is the name of an online and print graphic novel series that has Usenet at its core. It’s a lovely piece of art created by very talented artist. Check it out from your local library or used book store…
Or… cough… from your local Usenet group dealing in comix warez.
Simple. Usenet is an email inbox anyone can read.
What it looked like was an email program with a list of subject names like mail folders, each containing subject lines of conversation threads. The threads were fully branched, replies under the correct messages, like Lemmy. Not a simple list, like email.
Also unlike email, the messages were posted publicly instead of to you.
There was a list of newsgroup names for different subjects, you’d pick which of those to get messages from to appear as the “mail folders”.
The names were in a hierarchy, so computer subjects were comp.something, hobbies/recreation were rec.something etc. a bit like website names, only back to front, general to more specific, e.g uk.rec.sheds, alt.startrek.fanfic , rec.humor, rec.humor.funny.
You’d download messages from (and upload your replies to) a server and it would share messages with other servers, like Lemmy federation. So each group would be a merge of all messages from all around the world. Effectively there would only be ONE alt.folklore.urban for instance.
Usually your isp would run a server and you’d use that.
At first it wasn’t mainly used as a way to share binary files encoded as text messages, but eventually that took over, isps dropped having servers and big paid ones took over.
Oh, one really cool thing, newsreader programs would usually show you which message threads had new messages, so it was easy to keep up with interesting conversations.
