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?
That's a cute grumpy old man take but I don't think it really holds up, not as a main cause of the desertion from Usenet at least. It's true that Usenet arose during a time when people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them, but there were also a lot fewer people on the internet. I won't hazard a guess as to in raw numbers whether the number of people who understand computers rose or decreased, but even if it decreased the fact is that there are tons of people today who were on Usenet in the day and no longer are, even though they presumably know enough about computers to get on it. Insofar as simplicity of access matters (and oh, how it matters) I suspect it's not just about how people back then knew how to do harder things, but also that everything was harder. The differential between getting on Usenet and getting elsewhere on the internet was less large than today, where the internet overall has gotten much more user-friendly and Usenet has not.
Offhand I'd guess a more salient factor is discoverability. In order to get onto a forum you need to 1) learn that it exists, 2) be interested in checking it out, 3) check it out and 4) participate. How do people even hear about Usenet these days, let alone hear something that makes them want to check it out? When I think of it, my path to Usenet was via the TalkOrigins.org website. Even then I bounced off of actually getting onto the newsgroup for what might have been years before I finally succeeded. And that was back when ISPs supported newsgroups! How many other "portals" to Usenet newsgroups are there - I don't mean a web interface, I mean any website that a random person surfing the web might run into that would 1) let them know this newsgroup exists and 2) make them want to check it out/participate badly enough that they'll go through the many, many steps required to do so ?
Discoverability is even an issue once you are on Usenet. Here I am, a person who I think has a little bit of experience with the thing, asking on Kbin for people's recommendations because I don't have a way within Usenet to know which newsgroups are active and which are good. You have to trawl through the list, subscribe and then you find out, and the list is much too large for a layperson to trawl through usefully. I'm working with the advantage of vaguely remembering which newsgroups I liked and were humming back when I was there; I don't know how a total newcomer would manage. Maybe there are actual websites and portals out there that help, dunno if anyone has recommendations.
Usenet suffers from two problems: 1. Network effects and 2. Paywall.
Usenet used to be where it was at for conversation on the Internet. Then it moved. Getting people to go back to Usenet is probably going to be as hard as spinning up a Facebook competitor. You want to go where people are.
Secondly, Usenet used to be bundled into your internet package along with some basic email hosting and maybe some website hosting. But then the binaries groups exploded and a lot of the ISPs dropped support. So you have to go out and buy a separate package for access now.
It is purely a matter of free public servers. Right now, the free public servers are almost all Fedverse. But they could just as easily be Usenet servers. If the free Fedverse servers close like free Usenet servers did, then Fedverse will also decline. But Usenet actually has some superior features that Fedverse lacks (e.g. automatic merging of groups), so if free Usenet servers pop back up, it would take off again.
There is https://www.eternal-september.org. For me the biggest hurdle tbh was finding an email provider that was 1) anonymous (including not requiring my credit card obvi) so that I could have a specific identity for Usenet 2) had IMAP/POP3 support so I could use it with Thunderbird and 3) wasn't gmail, yahoo or outlook/hotmail because I already have accounts with those and don't want to keep switching. I actually failed, I ended up having to pay the email provider I'd picked for IMAP support.
Is that legit @JoeHill? I thought you were dead.
They framed him on a murder charge!
Don’t mourn; organize!