9 comments

  • cowmix2 hours ago
    Usenet is the main reason I started my own ISP in ’93: to have a reliable USENET feed. I loved it then, and I love it now.<p>Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...</a>
    • DamonHD1 hour ago
      Similar! And for a while my back bedroom in London was one of the world&#x27;s top USENET &#x27;transit&#x27; nodes, getting as high as ~#6 IIRC!
  • cmacleod41 hour ago
    I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsgrouper.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsgrouper.org</a> cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.
  • onion2k1 hour ago
    Usenet was great in the late 90s and early 2000s. I posted <i>a lot</i>, and met some great people. I got a job doing tech review of books about WAP and WML from my posts in a group about the forerunner to mobile internet, and another job with a company making intranet software from some posts about ASP and vbscript. I&#x27;ve no idea where I&#x27;d go for that sort of forum today.
  • alexkkoo931 hour ago
    how much coffee does my guy need lol. Can&#x27;t read a page without a request for additional caffeine
  • kseistrup3 hours ago
    &#x2F;me is still running an NNTP server…
    • inopinatus11 minutes ago
      Me too, but not for usenet. The server-to-server protocol is a low ceremony, high observability, standardised and battle-proven gossip-flood protocol with hierarchical channelisation and robust mature tooling, ideal for eventually-consistent distribution of telemetry and control messages over a node mesh of uncertain reliability up to global scale. What&#x27;s not to like?
    • davidwritesbugs2 hours ago
      hmmm, interesting. .... address? Can I get an account?
      • cykros27 minutes ago
        <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eternal-september.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eternal-september.org&#x2F;</a><p>Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).
      • kseistrup1 hour ago
        I&#x27;m sorry, it&#x27;s only for people I know personally. Also, it only holds minor Usenet hierarchies like the vestigial dk.*.<p>It&#x27;s not too difficult to set up INN2, and it&#x27;s easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
  • turblety3 hours ago
    It&#x27;s so disappointing that we could have had Usenet, but instead have centralised&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;ad&#x2F;spyware invested Facebook&#x2F;Reddit&#x2F;Xitter&#x2F;Tiktok.
    • cykros26 minutes ago
      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eternal-september.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eternal-september.org&#x2F;</a> last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.<p>But yes, it&#x27;s definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
  • kls0e54 minutes ago
    impressive, thank you.
  • ksherlock8 hours ago
    if nothing else, it&#x27;s much more usable than the google news archives.
    • DamonHD1 hour ago
      Seems to have patchy coverage in the places I was looking, and date range search wasn&#x27;t working for me. OTOH, I think I found some posts not archived by Google...
  • greygood4 hours ago
    censored