One of the things that contributed to the downfall of USENET was when people worked out how to post binary files, encoded as multi-part blocks of ASCII text. It still has piracy problems but you can just ignore that stuff.
Ignore all the software pirates over there. Yes, sir, the ones sitting at the free bar full of top shelf liquor with strippers on each side. Yup, better not go over there.
In fact we’ll provide you with a handy list of all of the places you should absolutely avoid. Indexed by interest and type even!
I would hate for people to see this index of places with potentially illegal content. The temptation is just too high. I’ll gladly guard it from innocent users with you. My eyes and heart are ready to protect the realm.
Oh world, that itching in my fingers! Some FOSS client for android that you can recommend?
Oh no, we wouldn’t want that to happen.
Want to make sure you don’t accidentally download that new Mario movie? Definitely don’t visit these files in order. Should you, accidentally, encounter something that looks like the Mario movie, simply check if it matches this sha256 sum. If it doesn’t, you’re still in the clear.
Stay safe out there, you upright citizen!
First and second rules exist for a reason.
These two rules caused Usenet to be abandoned by people who were once passionate about being part of the community, and instead taken over by spammers and bots.
Which first and second rules? Here on lemmy?
strippers? You mean the cocaine and hookers and cuban cigars, as well as all the blue label you can consume!
You should never go to usenet, you will see unbridled speed for nzb downloads, that are blindingly fast compared to that p2p stuff. Oh and actually 0-days the p2p sites get weeks later.
Back in the day I used to download the entirety of alt.music.indie (or whatever it was called) and spend weeks giving an honest listen to every album. I found so many artists through Usenet
it’s
interestingbullshit if the article author actually things that binaries were the problem. What ended the usenet was google groups providing a gateway to the usenet for people who had no idea what the usenet was. Lots of dumb users posting low quality content, and eventually bots spamming all relevant groups. Binaries had been around forever, in dedicated newsgroups, and they most certainly did not contribute to the downfall of usenet, if anything, the opposite.Dude. You killed the Piped bot.
LOL I noticed just now - but it appears by @glassware explanation that it wasn’t actually my link, but a patch that would have affected every link posted to which piped reacts
It’s at 91 replies to itself. It was at 25 when I posted that 2 hours ago. I wonder how long it will be allowed to continue?
It had already (been) stopped 3 hours ago.
Looks like they commited a change to Piped bot two hours ago which accidentally removed the functionality to actually change the link. Whoops!
Do you have a name / user id of a piped bot developer? Because while we’re at it, I think that bot should also avoid responding to itself - which would also prevent such a scenario completely.
good riddance.
Absolutely. I tried getting back into Usenet a few years ago and it was like Yahoo Answers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Wait is there blackjack too?
My first ever internet contribution was a post to “alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die”
Hah!
I’m all for getting into old school tech, I even like to browse neocities.org on occasion just for the hit of nostalgia for the old web rings. I never got into newsgroups though, and I’m wondering what reasons you might use that instead of something like Lemmy, Mastodon etc?
Apart from the piracy side, I know all about that already lol
Because all the oldheads are there and they have a wealth of arcane and also useful knowledge you can’t find anywhere else
How fitting and wonderful that we manifest something truly like a fantasy world.
Oh, I’ve read of such problems, they’re ancient but still haunt some even now after the downfall of stackoverflow.
Are there known solutions or packages I can install?
Not amongst us or on these platforms. Nay perhaps not even on this protocol. Grey beards and 90s hackers you must seek, those whose craft comes from before the .com bubble and even Keanu Reeves. Many secrets they know that have since been lost and much of our ways do they shun.
Where can I find these hackers?
If they still wield their keyboards, you may find them in Newsgroups.
What URL will guide me the way?
Oh My child, URLs will not help you. You must learn to navigate the Usenet and its Newsgroups. Come, Drægōnëḏgelôṟḏ will show you the way.
I would totally read that book
Cool, I just installed Thunderbird and am giving it a go.
Ooh can you use thunderbird for Usenet? I already use it for desktop email but I might have to go try Usenet too just for the hell of it
Because although there are a lot of usenet clients, there is no Sync for usenet
Hey also. Gopher is also getting a bit of a hit, but mostly due to a new protocol someone came up with called Gemini. It’s like Gopher a lot but has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
You can find out more about it here. I recommend Lagrange for your client. Two places I like to go to are Station (gemini://station.martinrue.com/) and Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/). BBS (gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) is also a new one on the scene.
And the nice thing about Lagrange is that it also supports the Finger protocol which basically is a way to read the
.projector.planfile on a given user for the indicated system. Those files for those that never used them allowed a user to type a short status update into them that folks could then poll at any given time. Basically “ye olde status update”.There’s a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/) and it works really well in Lagrange.
the .plan file in a user’s home directory is displayed when the user is fingered
Heh.
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Gopher lost out to WWW in part because Gopher was proprietary. The University of Minnesota owned the code and proposed to charge server owners for using it. Meanwhile Sir Tim over at CERN was handing out the original
httpdunder an MIT-style license.There was some early work supporting things like forms and search on Gopher. But it was pretty much abandoned as soon as WWW started catching on.
University of Minnesota, my dude…software named for their mascot.
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Gopher lost out to WWW in part because Gopher was proprietary
That may be so but gopher was never any fun in comparison to www
Oh, it was - before we had the WWW. I remember the day when a co-student told me to have a look at this new web thingy, “like gopher, but with hypertext!”.
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[Gemini] has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.
“Markup” would be a better term here. Markdown is a specific markup language which Gemini doesn’t use.
See this? These are the comments I live for. You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
There’s a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/)…
That’s neat! Thanks!
What’s the cool thing to do there?
One cool thing is the game astrobotany, but Gemini shines in its focus on connecting through text only medium. Try midnight city for that.
(If you can’t find URLs, ping me and I’ll update the post)
Funnily enough I was toying with the idea of making a Gopher based Lemmy frontend for the lulz. Maybe Gemini then?
Wow thanks for this comment, Lagrange works incredibly well. I had a lot of fun trying out Gemini, I had been doing Gopher recently but Im definitely going to add this to my goofing around.
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The fact that usenet has still hung on all this time as more than just a place for people to share pirated files is honestly impressive, and also is a pretty decent endorsement. Unfortunately it has a fair number of weaknesses, especially in terms of moderation tools and access these days, but ultimately a lot of what people want in a social media platform can be found on usenet. An effort to update it for modern sensibilities might actually create something pretty cool.
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Lack of censorship tools is a strength.
Clearly you aren’t old enough to remember why Usenet faded away in the first place. It was the first platform to drown in an endless torrent of spam and low quality posts
low quality posts
You’re being charitable, imo. USENET was plagued by a seemingly never-ending parade of mentally ill savants who lived to post, lived to troll and lived to avoid killfiles. It made it deeply unpleasant.
I see in the AMA they’re discussing moderated newsgroups, I never saw any in my day but frankly, moderation is often worse. Reddit had, I think, the most workable idea of them all, community policing and hiding content beneath a threshold. The unfortunate corporate reality of Reddit begat Lemmy and here we are now.
With Lemmy and the Fediverse, I don’t see USENET as being in any way relevant, other than its continuing role as a solid resource for above-average pirates. I don’t miss it even a little bit, it was utter rubbish by the end.
There was some moderated groups, the group name usually ended in .moderated.
All it meant was somebody with the moderator role on that group had to approve every post… only thing I never understood is how one became a moderator on those groups 🤷🏻♂️
Ultimately Lemmy isn’t any better than Reddit because your “account” is tied to a server, so it isn’t truly censorship resistant. It can easily get as bad as Reddit is with the ham fisted censorship at the whim of some misanthropic moderator.
Nostr is certainly the future once it matures a bit more and becomes more user friendly.
Most clients would allow you to filter out what (or who) you personally didn’t want to see, without having to censor it. Actually not a bad system: allows both freedom of speech and some kind of “moderation”. The system could of course be improved, e.g. by having some default, mod-curated server-side filters that users could opt into, but people would still be allowed to see the whole uncensored content if desired.
Exceptions could be made for illegal content (e.g. pirated stuff), where it would be deleted server-side by the admins (illegal defined to be “in the jurisdiction where the data is stored”).
Freedom should not be taken for granted.
I started using Usenet in the early 90s and have continued to use it until today. Modern clients are very convenient and easy to search and filter out whatever you like. So no, if you aren’t too lazy to learn your tools then it is more than sufficient without some dystopian social media tier control of the protocol.
“The truth is you love censorship, and so does everyone else. The only question is whether you’re ready to admit it.”
https://gizmodo.com/why-censorship-is-part-of-everyday-life-section-230-1850095976
Maybe it’s time to dig out and polish my NNTP client that I’ve written 30 years ago.
Now that’s a 4 letter acronym I haven’t seen for a while.
And it still works.
Are you one of the wizards of yore? The ones who were there when the old magic was written?
In a way. Gobelin was my NNTP client, and Connector was my client for multiplayer games. I did some more work back then, like writing our companies’ SMPT gateway. Ah, those were the days…
I remember Agent and Xnews (for poor people).
I remember Agent and Xnews (for poor people).
Well, both imply that you had access to an X terminal. Gobelin and Connector were written for a text-based interface. You might have seen those things with a green on green screen and a serial connection to the host machine. Although Connector also ran as an X application, thanks to some seriously smart system libraries.
Is there a “usenet for dummies” guide somewhere, for 90s kids?
Asking for a friend.
It’s quite easy, but you’ll need an account and a client.
- Create an account on eternal-september.org
- Change and note your password.
- Follow the tutorial of your elected client. I recommend [email protected], you can learn how to add a Usenet account in Thunderbird here.
Ask me if you have a question!
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Certainly. You should ask your favorite search engine.
It’s not that easy, because the vast majority of articles are for using Usenet to download binaries. It’s not what the article was talking about.
Simply add a ‘-binaries’ ( just tested with Google)
And first result : https://www.privacyaffairs.com/usenet-guide/
And yet… it’s a tutorial about how to download with Usenet.
Sorry I failed you. I just read up the setup parts :/. It was so simpler when I used outlook abd my Internet provider offered access to newsgroups.
Well it was back to 56k. I don’t think I regret those, now I have fiber.
I remember ICQ
Uh oh!
I hear those words.
I tried to recover an ancient icq account but it looks like the company sold and nuked all the old accounts. Bummer, was hoping all my mid 90s friends might still be there.
Also changed protocol. Old UINs were, I think, usable for some time.
30250969 was my user id.
When I try to remember mine I get confused with my SSN.
16577270 was mine
8833052 was mine. I was early
I’m so happy I’m not the only one.
25553477 was mine, before it was stolen by some russian.
My ICQ UIN is only 7 digits
My sweet memory of an instant messenger not trying to fuck with you (lots of incoming messages were, though, but those were sometimes real people ; I actually know of people who met each other via ICQ contact directory and have a happy marriage ; don’t think anything else has come close).
Other than that, it was just a better time. WCIII, Perfect World, WoW, Travian. Forum-based text roleplaying games (LOTR and HP). And ICQ as the way people would communicate, which would transcend interests fading, forums dying etc.
Pre-MS Skype was nice too, though.
OG Travian was the shit. I made a lot of friends there that persisted long after I left the game.
Well, for me mostly not that far - but the only time I was in an alliance close to the top has indeed left some people in my buddy list.
Other times it was mostly me and my IRL friends and their friends and so on in alliances I’d be let into.
But - yeah. For some people it was like real war, with all the logistics and obligatory setup of a second and a third so that your account would never be AFK when a few thousands off troops with catapults are coming for ya. I still don’t understand how they’d have the time, with university and school and work.
Isn’t like 90% of the traffic on Usenet from alt.bin.*? In other words, file sharing. I’ve looked around some newsgroups, and most of them are just filled with spam posts
I mean with Streaming Services cutting down the Password-Sharing so that you need to pay multiple expensive services to get access and it’s not convenient anymore with having to switch between them to find something to watch I’m not surprised that a piracy-heavy social network is thriving…
I kinda want to do this and also go back to IRC. Some of my happier moments and interesting conversations were on IRC. My best friend who eventually became my husband was met on IRC. Good times.
So many good memories on IRC. I miss it so much. Discord just isn’t the same.
IRC still exists. You can just like… do it.
Yeah, and talk to the two bots and one person who’s been idle for 6 days.
It’s mostly this unless you go to a popular server on a linux channel. I did that recently from windows 3.11, and it was just like the good old days
I was never really on the IT channels, so that wouldn’t do it for me. I was big on #ProAudio (back in the days when I did that for a living) and #Atheism and #Indiana to meet local people. Nobody on any of those channels on any of the nets I used to be on, if those themselves even exist.
The ones surrounding popular open-source projects are often quite active.
The 20th anniversary of Steam made me think of the initial controversy over it on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games and I discovered some of the same people are still posting there.
We may yet be able to take back the internet. I’ve also seen people use IRC again/still. For actually other things than botnets.
Stupid question of the day does this compete with the fediverse or it goes along it? Not pointing fingers just curious.
It’s the fediverse’s great great grandpa.
It’s not a competitor, no.
Federation of usenet required either a peering link or scripting to pull down all new articles, it isn’t automatically done, like Lemmy
Yeah that was its downfall really… anyone could run a server, but getting actual stuff onto it, and getting your posts recognised, required peering, which required being on someone’s good side. I remember setting up a server back in the day and searching for someone that would do peering, and it just wasn’t happening unless I agreed to take everything which on my small connection just wasn’t feasable.
Binary groups becoming piracy hubs didn’t help either… it meant most of the small groups that ran servers gave up as the data requirements got too large.
Seems like the committee is only like 3 people, so who knows how that’ll go. It’s no different then any other open-source ecosystem out there now, it needs to compete with them and gain developers and usable applications. It’ll be an entirely new framework from scratch, so why would people pick their product over others? The only thing that remains original is the USENET brand.
It’s still alive and kicking under the old framework though. Most ISPs dropped their news servers ages ago but there are still loads of free and subscription providers out there.
I don’t know what this committee thinks it can accomplish that the fediverse hasn’t already picked up the torch on, but power to them. The less centralized and more diverse the Internet is, the better.
They still have centralization in way though, as in the Big-8 has moderation powers regardless of what server is hosting. Though a server can probably patch that out.
I still think a Usenet like service would be brilliant and it’s a shame there isn’t a Lemmy-like service that has that.
To clarify, what I mean is decentralised infrastructure (you go onto the news server you want) with shared content (ie the same was that every Usenet post ends up on every Usenet server, if that server carries that newsgroup) - it gives all the advantages of federalisation (don’t like your server, just go to another, you lose little or nothing) without the disadvantages of unintuitive discovery and fragmentation.
It’s not text only if you have UUDecode.
