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.

My first ever internet contribution was a post to "alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die"

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

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 .project or .plan file 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 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.

Maybe it's time to dig out and polish my NNTP client that I've written 30 years ago.

Is there a "usenet for dummies" guide somewhere, for 90s kids?

Asking for a friend.

I remember ICQ

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 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.

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.

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 not text only if you have UUDecode.

No offense to the fediverse, but I think usenet was first