I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?

Oh, that's a fascinating wild post.

> Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.

They did not acquire usenet, they acquired Dejanews, a big usenet-archive and gateway to the usenet. Usenet itself is made of decentraliced servers. Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days. Each with their own groups. There also were public groups, maintained by some hive-mind-org or something.

Anyway, Usenet still exists, it's not dead, technically. But there is also not much alive either. File sharing on commercial servers seems to be very popular now, and the discusion-groups are receiving more spam than actual worthy content.

> Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused,

50:50 I'd say. There were many tech-groups. But pretty fast there were also an equal amount of non-tech-groups. And in terms of hyper-focus I would say, reddit has far more focus today than usenet ever delivered. It's more about finding a sub and filling it.

> generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does.

I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform. Yes, usenet had more nerds and expert, more technical capable people. But usenet was also significant smaller, as was the whole internet at the time. You had some kind of natural selection, as internet generally, and usenet specifically only lured very specific people in. With special interests, from a special age and culture. Today it's different, you have anyone from anywhere making a space. I'd say those time are lost forever. At best you get some overhomogenized communities, like this hackernews here. But if you look at reddit, discord, or web-forums in general, you will still find hyper-focused spaces. Just not necessarily with the kind of people your chemistry matches with.

The question is - What are you missing? I suspect you probably miss something that has more to do with the participants.

In the early days of Usenet there were very few ways to access it from the perspective of an average person. You either had to be working on one of the small number of companies that were internet connected or were at a university. That significantly restricted the available pool of people using it, and also filtered that pool.

Up through the early 90s that natural filter mechanism kept the focus of individual groups small, reduced noise, and increased signal. Over time as internet access became more widespread that signal to noise decreased, and most modern forums still have difficulty with it.

There are a few other interesting characteristics - the specific nature of the tree approach and the availability of lots of specific groups gave it some uniqueness - Today you might see a bit of that in Reddit subs, Facebook groups, and other similar platforms, albeit lacking the tree.

> If I remember my computing history correctly, Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.

Usenet was a distributed set of news peering relationships, exchanging posts via NNTP. There was nothing to acquire, so that's not what happened.

Google merely set up a web interface to it, which was eventually extended to the abomination that was Google Groups. This was intended to be some sort of mix of Usenet group and mailing list, all via a web interface. In reality it was awful and I suspect development on it stopped 10+ years ago.

> Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does

I see you didn't hang out in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die much

This is a strangely rose-tinted view of Usenet. Usenet was a mess well before Eternal September. You can't talk about Usenet without talking about alt.*

After alt.* was inagurated, the very first group was (IIRC) alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork. Then there were alt.destroy.the.earth and alt.pave.the.earth, which were bitter enemies despite their opposition to alt.save.the.earth, because if you destroyed the earth there'd be nothing left to pave. Alt was also the home of the Big Seven sex groups, plus piracy in the alt.binaries groups. The talk.* groups had problems as well. Oh, and then there was alt.2600, which purposely had a moderator who rejected any and all postings: you had to hack USENET and assume moderator privileges to post there.

I think easily the closest thing we have nowadays to USENET is reddit. And, to be honest, if you average over its entire audience, it's more tame than USENET was.

> Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.

That is false and nonsensical. Usenet is a federated network of NNTP servers; Google just joined that with their own implementation having an awful web front end, which they proceeded to revise in even worse directions. That happened right in the middle of a decline that was happening, driven by ISPs shutting down their NNTP servers. So it might have looked like Usenet is somehow transitioning to Google. Google did also acquire a Usenet archive, and then make it impossible to use.

Anhyway, Usenet is alive and (sort of) well. There are new posts daily in newsgroups like comp.unix.programmer, comp.lang.c. Even comp.lang.lisp sees some action.

See you there!

--

Hey look, comp.lang.awk has a new post, from the somewhat kooky, but topical, KPop 2GM

--

I'm currently using the news.eternal-september.org NNTP server.

Note: there is spam, but not nearly as much as you see through the Google Groups interface, and that's the interface that offers no filtering features.

You need a newsreader with killfile processing. I use the terminal-based slrn (S-Lang Read News). It has a score feature for assigning scores to articles based on matches on arbitrary fields. If you give something a -9999 score, it disappears. The fields have a lot of information. You can kill based on what server someone is coming from, or what client they are supposedly using, if you want.

Usenet is still there, I download TV shows from it all the time. The discussion forums are still there, too, but are completely overridden with spam. Most of the public unix [0][1][2] servers have a Usenet server that federates with some other tilde servers, though not the wider usenet. I stumbled across a group called ALTEXXANET [3] that claims to have one, though I've not checked to see if it's still there.

What were some of the newsgroups you were interested in? When and why did you stop checking them?

[0] http://sdf.org/ [1] https://tildeverse.org/ [2] https://tilde.club/wiki/usenet-news.html [3] http://www.altexxanet.org/usenet.html

I think people overlook web forums. I would point to

https://coderanch.com/

https://www.dpreview.com/forums

and

https://polyamory.com/

as good examples. There are a lot of dead forums out there, but there are also ones where the administrators make the effort to greet new users and make them feel welcome. For instance that last forum covers a fraught issue where emotions run pretty high but the administrators do a good job of "onboarding" new users.

My favorite part of usenet was the FAQ's. I didn't have internet access at the time but I downloaded the comp.lang.c faq along with 3d graphics programming faq from a local BBS. Tons of fun reading!

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C-faq/faq/

The worst part about Facebook groups, Reddit, and even most forums is the same questions being repeated over and over. You can do sticky threads and links on subreddits (not really sure how you would do it on Facebook) but it's not often done.

Cool kids these days are using Urbit. It has the same style (p2p) and has a niche but active community of people interested in all kinds of areas, mainly tech, politics, aesthetics, etc.

If you find it 'gimmicky' which I don't, but lots do, just focus on the 'Groups' app.

https://urbit.org/getting-started

To communicate you need a 'ship' (an ID). This could be a free 'comet' and a paid planet. Layer 2 Planets are relatively cheap, and they'll be yours forever too, so it's just a one time payment.

You can find them here:

https://subject.network/buy/

https://azimuth.shop/ (3.5 bucks atm in this one)

https://wexpert.systems/

https://mocbel.house/

Any questions, lmk. (not affiliated, just a fan)

… [166/256] GIANT FILE… [167/256] GIANT FILE… [169/256] GIANT FILE… …

Kids today will never know the pain.

I'm disappointed that NNTP servers and clients didn't get wider use outside of Usenet.

Most public forums back in the day would have been vastly improved if they had been done as an NNTP server with each sub-forum as a newsgroup rather than doing them with something like phpBBB on an HTTP server.

Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems.

Same goes for non-chat communication within companies. Newsgroups on an internal NNTP server would be better in most ways than mailing lists for topics in which people actually need to discuss things as a group.

https://getaether.net/ is an attempt at a modern usenet, i.e. decentralised discussion. However it doesn’t have many users or third party clients.

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/superhighway84/ is a more directly nostalgia inspired clone of usenet.

You can still access USENET if you have an account on <https://www.eternal-september.org/>. <https://news.individual.net> works, too, but I think it costs ten euros a year.

HackerNews seems a viable alternative with a daily delivery of interesting topics, excellent moderators and often highly interesting comments from a diverse crowd of users -> check it out ;-)

Maybe check out some Tilde servers? https://tildeverse.org/

Some of them run their own NNTP servers as well.

It's clearly reddit.

... which is not to say I love reddit or believe it has the same aesthetic as usenet, etc. ... but it's reddit.

I wrote a dependency tree python3 library to make your own NNTP servers:

https://pypi.org/project/nntpserver/0.0.3/

https://github.com/epilys/nntpserver.py

It's used in my link aggregator forum, https://sic.pm/ which also has a mailing list bridge functionality.

As a demo, I have implemented a HN mirror on NNTP: (quoting README.md)

hnnntp.py querying news.ycombinator.com (hackernews) API and caching results in an sqlite3 database. A public instance might be online at nessuent.xyz:564 (TLS only)

Reddit is in theory the same.. but it also is loaded with spam, in the form of ads paid to reddit. This is worse.

Compare: FPGA group on USENET, very little spam: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch.fpga

Reddit, full page animated old-spice ads: https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/

Also as much as you dislike google groups, just compare the UI of the above two.. ugh.. of course there is old reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/FPGA/

You dismiss Reddit pretty quickly but if you want a bulletin board-style forum on hyper-specific subjects then it's a good option. I'm subscribed to some hyper-specific tech subjects and the posts are very professional and helpful.

The other place I've found even more hyper-specific subjects is, ironically, Facebook. I, in general, stay off of Facebook but when I was looking for details on some very rare hardware, the communities there were actually the most active and useful.

You may be lamenting Eternal September and not the loss of Usenet itself.

Reddit. Most know the reputation that the largest subreddits have, but if you drill down past those troll-targets, you'll find very specialized subreddits that have very focused conversation.

I’ll take the liberty to re-post what I wrote in a similar thread:

It can be quite difficult to find online oases […]. HN is quite unique. Have you considered starting your own Slack, invite interesting people and build a new oasis? (Or Matrix channel.) It would take some work to get people to join, but it’s not impossible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582270

The main difference between Usenet and Reddit/SO/etc was posting speed. The Usenet groups I posted in were slow by today's standards. No one expected an immediate response, and the groups didn't hide things after a few hours. Paging back through 5 or 6 pages of threads in `tin` was common. The equivalent today is probably a subject-specific mailing list.

There are some BBS based mail networks, but they are hyper specific to retro stuff I believe.

Based on your description of Usenet I think what you miss is the context around Usenet (exact period of life, young/single/student for example) and not the Usenet itself. You can find plenty of places where there are forum like discussions, but it won't be the same without the context.

Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. I'm not sure if this is dead yet.

That's absolutely not what happened. What actually happened was that binaries traders took over the Internet's best discussion medium and used to to shuttle uuencoded chunks of huge files to every single Usenet server in the world, and screamed bloody murder when anyone failed to keep up. This naturally drove the cost of serving Usenet wildly up, and independent ISPs dropped the service just as the retail Internet came of age, because haphazardly serving porn videos and pirated software to 0.5% of their customer base wasn't worth the cost of giant fast disk arrays.

Things like DejaNews were just the dying gasp of Usenet. Google didn't ruin anything (though I sorely wish they could have kept the archives online).

Take a look at https://lemmy.ml/ . It's a federated reddit alternative that has a very usenet-like feeling. You can also go for one of the other instances (there are some good ones like feddit.de and also some really crazy ones).

I think different projects are now active in different places depending on the whims of that project. They might have their own forum like https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/, or they might be active on discord, or reddit, or they might just discuss everything on github, or mailing lists.

Back in the usenet days there was really only one place to host discussions, and that was usenet. But now there are lots of places. I guess this makes it harder to find, and makes it harder to jump from community to community.

Reddit is probably the closest thing. And I wouldn't judge all subreddits by the "front page" subreddits. I think the ruby and emacs subs are good.

Usenet still exists, but some groups are mostly (but not entirely) spam, at least when you view them through Google Groups, for example comp.lang.python at https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python . It would be great if a coordinated effort to mark spam as spam cleaned up comp.lang.python. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.fortran has less spam, and I regularly flag spam there.

This is not technically Usenet, but you can access various mailing lists via NNTP at nntp://news.gmane.io. There used to be a browser interface, but apparently that attracted abuse and legal threats.

Hard to participate as an English-speaker, but just to scope out a still-thriving BBS: students at the local university maintain a telnet BBS called PTT, which is essentially the Reddit of Taiwan. As I understand, it's been crucial in recent political movements (like the Sunflower movements and parliamentary occupation) and lost of current events in Taiwan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System

Usenet did not require a "web browser" nor Javascript. Advertising came eventually but it was not accompanied by surveillance. Famously, the first advertisement on the internet was allegedly via Usenet, from an immigration lawyer. But ads were basically just spam as I recall, much less invasive on ads on the www, and easier to filter out.

Most importantly, I never read anything on Usenet that suggested, "If we do not have a robust advertising ecosystem, all this "free content" will disappear." Even regulators today are prone to believe this nonsense. Quite silly. I remember getting news and other content from Usenet without the presence of any advertising. With Usenet, the cost was the internet connection. That's it. No allegedly "necessary" trade-off between (a) allowing personal data collection and surveillance and (b) accessing "free content". Accessing mainstream news is still just as "free" today as it was then. Relatively little news or other "content" on the www is password protected. Except in the heydays of Usenet there were no advertising company-sponsored browser vendor Javascript engine-powered "paywalls" to try to annoy users into paying (more) money, on top of the internet connection charges.

discord /s

every specialized sub-group now holds small portion of the web by/for themselves and only needs to interact with those of same mindset — no need to keep every single word in public forever.

but what you really missing is people of the same~ish age-group having enough time and topics to argue about

Usenet (IRC channels too) had a sense of _place_ that I think is less common in mainstream social media, but still exists to an extent in forums, just with a worse interface overall. I remember some things fondly (partly because I was a teenager) but I'd struggle to say it was superior and certainly no healthier than today. I don't remember it being tech-focused or professional, unless you only hung out in comp.* and not alt.*. Like, who remembers Terry Tickle etc?

> Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does.

It all depends on the community you want to hang out in. Usenet was tech-focused because the only people who knew about it or had access were tech-focused and the community was smaller (see: Eternal September).

One of your best options are niche, smaller or heavily moderated reddit communities or web forums that share the same characteristics.

Honestly I think Reddit, at least in terms of topic segmentation, original demographic, and rough functionality (threads conversations) is the closest thing we have.

The biggest difference: the maturity and culture (compared to when reddit started).

This isn't a problem that needs "solving". If you want a different community, you either need to find one or start one. HN is probably the closest demographic to what Usenet had, so advertising anything you start here would make sense.

I've thrown around the idea of a paid access forum with heavy amounts of curation, strict rules etc. The biggest obstacle is the network effect. The only ways I have thought of to overcome this initially are: have a launch date with pre-signups so that a chunk of people join at the same time, and, have some high profile individuals from within your demographic agree to join. Eg find some CEOs or CTOs, academics, thought leaders, commentators, whoever - people with big names within your target demographic - and have them sign on to participate. This will attract more people and might help with the initial network effect hurdle.

I think what you miss is the time when only the intelligent and sensible <10% of the population are on-line. There was no social network, so Usenet was where the cool kids hanged out. Now that everyone is on-line, and dragged 99% of the intelligent and sensible people over to social networks, so the remaining 0.1% of the population is not large enough to make Usenet interesting any more.

I never thought of usenet as tech focused. There were many areas that were non-tech topics. Sure there was comp.sys., but all the alt. boards and others. Web forums were kind of the spirtual successor, and many of them have subject subforums, but within that most web forums segregate discussion by thread. I find that much more useful since usenet felt like a mailing list of post after post after post. Threads allow me to ignore discussion that aren't relevant to me.

I haven't migrated from web foums to reddit or facebook groups though I'm sure there is much information in those places. I prefer that independent web forums introduce some friction to participating. You have to create an account, and some forums have limits for new members until they reach a certain post count. While the friction is small that does seem to discourage bad behavior a little.

I have easily found forums for subjects I'm interested in, but none of them are tech, so I don't know whether you'll find web forums on current tech subjects.

I don't see it mentioned yet that there are some still active, moderated Usenet groups, such as misc.legal.moderated and misc.taxes.moderated, which don't include spam.

Back in the day, even some unmoderated groups were mostly self-moderated, such as the comp.*.oracle and comp.*.perl newsgroups. What spam there was, was posted by humans, not bots, and was quickly ignored to oblivion.

I have found similar scenes in the p2p/decentralized/dWeb protocols groups. Scuttlebutt, Mastadon, DAT/Beaker Browser/Hypercore, IPFS, Gun protocol.

If you're interested, the Internet Archive is doing a dWeb Camp where a bunch of these folks will be coming together in the northern California woods to build further community.

As an experiment, I'd love to see a forum which required all users to use their real identities, where identities for user accounts must be legally verified through an accredited notary service, similar to E-Verify/I-9 verification.

I'm curious how much less toxic behavior on a platform like that would be.

Smaller communities won't be as active, but discord servers have been great for talking with like minded people about hyper-specific things. The thing I like about discord is that even if the main server seems pretty general, they have channels and those tend to get much more specific.

It's up to the community how real time it feels. I know some servers that have global interest and there's usually someone to talk to regardless of when you ask a question. On the other hand I have also noticed servers where it's becomes obvious who is on EST vs PST.

Google groups hasn't been the main method of communication for a while.

There's discords for TV shows and Games, but I also see discord for development projects. Some even use patreon and have discord access as a subscription benefit where the developer posts beta builds.

For example, Uberduck https://uberduck.ai/ has an pretty active discord for developers. Uberduck have a free tier when you can synthesize TTS that sound like well known voice actors or singers. https://app.uberduck.ai/speak#mode=tts-reference&voice=cave-... And it has a paid tier if you want to clone your own voice.

EleutherAI's discord has a similar healthy discord community. GPT-NeoX talk there.

Two Minute Papers , the youtube channel run by Dr.Károly Zsoln has its own unofficial discord as well. Unofficial but Dr. Károly Zsoln has shared a twitter linking to it, so he is aware of it.

Lichess.org has a discord server.

I can't promise if your hyper-specific interests will have discord server dedicated to it, but there's many. In fact my university has a specific server for CS and Math and you can ask for help, and from the last time I checked, specific professors do come and answer questions, although more likely it's other classmates.

Most of this thread is devoted to correcting his understanding of Usenet history rather than providing useful info. What he wants is to find subject-focused discussion forums. The answer is to stop thinking in terms of Usenet and look for forums on special interest web sites. You can find anything from boardgaming (https://boardgamegeek.com/) to computational fluid dynamics (https://www.cfd-online.com/). I find the best forum experience is when you have strong moderation by subject-area specialists whose only concern is to keep things on-topic.

The forum/mailing list format is over, most good discussions happen on discord now (some people swear by telegram - mostly Russians).

I'm not claiming it's a change for the better. I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of phpBB forums about every niche so I know what was lost. From a technical perspective forums are superior for long term discussions (especially for non-members!), but in terms where new stuff happens and where community forms - it's over. The closest replacement are specific channels on discord that allow sometimes for week-long discussions.

One of main social effects I see is that knowledge starts to get siloed. There are many technical details that exist online only on specific chats, which aren't google searchable. The main negative is that if you don't even know where to look or ask, it's way harder to figure out anything. There's also a positive: because people are forced to join they are more likely to contribute. In fact I have observed this in myself: often I only join some discord to look for one thing, but I just leave the server on afterwards. In many cases I see something worth responding to and morph from an observer into an active participant. This would never have happened on a forum. It's possible this factor is solely responsible for the current dominance of discord/telegram.

One future shift I can see is a move away from chats into VR. I don't think it's going to happen with zoomers, but alpha gen - assuming they grow up in VR spaces may find it natural to prefer literal talking as anime and furry avatars, with (almost) full nonverbal communication, instead of writing text messages to each other. In a way, it would be a return to the historical norm of human communication.

From a social trend perspective it's the same direction as the move away from forums into chats: worse information search (basically gone with VR). More emphasis on contributing and on personal relationships. The main disadvantage I can see is that it's going to place much stronger emphasis on people's characteristics: age, gender, native language.

We still have Usenet. I use the aioe server (I do not use the binary newsgroups).

I also have my own NNTP server (although currently there are very few messages so far, but anyone who is interested in this things can join if they want to do). Currently the messages are only on my NNTP server, but it would be possible to be propagated to/from other servers too.

I set up NNTP instead of using mailing lists/forums, since I think that NNTP is better. (It would be acceptable to also allow subscribing like it is a mailing list, and web interface, but the NNTP must be primary.)

There is still some spam, but the spam seems to come from Google, as far as I can tell.

Trivia: one of the first newsreaders that helped make Usenet popular in the 1980s was rn[0], written by Larry Wall, the same fellow who created Perl.

[0]It was one of the first newsreaders to take full advantage of character-addressable CRT terminals [Wikipedia]

There's still vBulletin/phpBB places out there. I spend a lot of time on Dragon Mount discussing Wheel of Time, or Lakers Ground talking about the LA Lakers. Physics Forums has always pretty good for any kind of academic discussion, not just physics.

The problem is discoverability. How would I find these places today if I hadn't already found them in 2001? I have no idea.

Unfortunately, the solution is also discoverability. Likely the biggest reason I still find these places satisfying is they're niche sites full of long-time contributors who know each other that have never become popular and never had eternal September happen because they're hard to find.

Discord is terrible and wish there wasn't this stupid push to put everything into them. Sure you get initial 'ooh I'm part of something going on here' feeling but it's just a giant unindexed chat that is ephemeral and fleeting. It's a realtime chat -- with channels! Big deal. No one tried to use IRC back in the day as a forum. Chaotic if need to catch up god forbid you miss something from a day ago. It's just so bad and nowhere like forums. A symptom of a generation that can only deal with their immediate present and has no sense of history and just goes through life like that.

I think a lot of people feel the same way however you need a critical mass of users. I'm just presuming I'm younger than you however I miss the old days of discussion forums, you'd have some for web comics, anime, TV shows all with their set of screen names that you learned and inside jokes that lived on. Along with this is my love of IRC (which I'm still idling in)

Now with the internet feeling like it's just Reddit, Facebook, Google, Discord, LinkedIn, and Pintrest a lot of the fun inside jokes have gone to die, and the groups are so large that no-one even looks at a username.

> generally quite professional

It most certainly was not.

The thing I miss about Usenet is maintaining article and comment scoring in trn (based on the subject, keywords and/or author)

With this I could easily surface interesting articles or replies by insightful people, while avoiding subjects and authors in which I had no interest.

This worked at a thread level, so I could quickly see any new threads, and new replies added to threads I was following, skipping over everything I had already marked as read.

For me this was more effective than the communal post scoring that took over on web forums, reddit, hn etc.

This may help to quench your nostalgia https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84

For the last couple years I've wondered if people would like something that combined the sleek, text-focused front end of HN with the ability to make subreddit-like moderated communities.

The "boringness" of the front end would keep the riff-raff out - why would they bother when Reddit et al give them a much bigger and more meme-addled audience - and it'd be more like the second coming of old-school Usenet that so many older techies seem to long for.

If only I were a software engineer rather than a data scientist.

I miss the local BBS's more. But in Chicago there were chi.* Usenet groups which where interesting as well. (They're still active... barely) Reddit has /r/chicago but it's not the same feel.

NextDoor sounds like something I don't want to check out (What happened to EveryBlock?) I'm not on Facebook, maybe there's some good local conversation happening there. . .? I'm surprised nothing has come close to BBS's yet in terms of meeting locals.

https://sqwok.im has old school forum feel mixed with new age chat, with both tech and non-tech ppl.

Matrix is literally intended to be a successor to USENET (although we haven't got the long-form async messaging sorted yet - https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ gives a hint of how it could work though)

You're welcome to have a virtual drink on https://midnight.pub :)

I really miss having a NATIVE app to access content from different communities in a standard format.

Along with the IRC Comic Chat in Windows 98 :’)

The OP resonates with me, and I feel like firing up M-x gnus again to browse the likes of comp.ai.nat-lang, comp.compilers, comp.std.c and alt.fan.montypython.

Perhaps it's time for a new USENET group, comp.misc.hn? I'd much prefer to read HN in a TUI with keyboard navigation than from a Web browser.

The best Usenet providers:

https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/the-best-usenet-provide...

I haven't test any of them but it SEEMS like Usenet is alive and kicking...

I think you can find the same vibe in Reddit, some forums and some mailing lists.

Also, HN not being subject focused works for me because I am interested in more than one subject.

One idea is if HN would introduce some tags, or categories so someone can filter if he's only interested in one subject.

DZone is like this, with different Zones and then with tags that get pretty specific. https://dzone.com/cloud-computing-tutorials-tools-news

I've been thinking about this myself. I made some real-world friends from usenet. Not extremely close ones obviously, but I hung out mostly in a ng dedicated to a band (Ween) and when I travelled to see shows, I always had folks to hang out with even if I went alone.

During the high days of that group, there were a number of websites dedicated to the band, but usenet was the home (members of the band even showed up now and then). Then one day someone created the first web forum dedicated to it, and it quickly racked up far more users than the newsgroup. The writing was on the wall.

I went and created an account but I could not STAND the web forum interfaces at the time - compared to Free Agent with its conversation threading, the web's early discussion forums were a bad, mean joke. But ignorant people for whom internet=www spoke in their legions and it was only a couple years before nobody came to the usenet forum anymore.

I briefly got into Delphi Forums at the behest of my first gf and there was one decent place I hung out in for a few years, but looking back, the evolution of right wing ratfucking on the internet was in full swing and the people I had lively debates with in there eventually became (in many cases) Facebook "friends" as we all onboarded there.

And there I lingered till 2016. Reddit is circling the drain at this point, even the subs that are dedicated to my own politics have become appalling lowest common denominator echo chambers.

I would love to go back to Usenet, much like NYC disco scenesters of the 70s would love to go back to Studio 54, but in both cases, it was a special place and a special time, and now we live here. I wish I had a better answer, but I'm pretty sure that's the answer.

This can be done on Aether, especially if one is willing to maintain their own records. Hard to find enough of the right people to agree to use such a tool, I suppose. Not sure what else we can do besides try to make them.

People still use Usenet, it's still going. Some groups get hundreds of ppd still.

Blind.... but it is geared towards the workplace, and not tech and gadgets in general. It has more unfiltered conversations, as people do speak their mind a bit more. (some eggregious ones, do get flagged/removed though).

Newsgroups are still there. I still read and post to them as do plenty of other people. Your ISP probably doesn't provide a news server anymore but there are plenty of free ones for the text only groups.

> HN is topic-focused, rather than subject-focused

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Something like that?

https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84

> HN is topic-focused, rather than subject-focused.

What does this mean? topic is literally a synonym for subject

Usenet is a spam-riddled cesspool, the only advantage it has over Reddit is that it is technically more open and it doesn't annoy you with its mobile app. I heard stories that it was better before eternal September, but I wasn't there, maybe some greybeards can comment on that.

And sure, some newsgroups stayed good, but the same can be said of Reddit. Some subreddits are very nice and technical, others are terrible.

stackexchange.com isn't a full replacement but definitely fulfills some of the use cases of Usenet.

I sure miss all the crazy fun at alt.devilbunnies back in the day

Telegram is really a great organizational app and social platform. I created and sold a startup based solely on telegram interactions.

4chan

Superhighway84

usenet still exists see: supernews

Usenet died for a number of reasons, and those reasons are core to what has kept any revival of NNTP-based forums, or strongly-similar variants / derivatives, from succeeding.

I've given my own take on this (just one random space alien cat's take, some familiarity, no major at-the-coalface experience) in a piece that's seen some currency, "Why Usenet Died", posted at ... Reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...

The TL;DR:

1 It got spammed to death.

2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.

3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.

4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.

Beyond that:

There has been a Usnet 2.0, or rather, Usenet II

The original Usenet was small and had very limited access. As of April, 1988, there were 381 newsgroups, 57,979 messages, an estimated 141,000 readers, of a total user population on connected hosts of 880,000, via Brian Reid's "USENET Readership Summary Reports". Virtually all were at selective-admissions universities, tech companies, and a small selection of government agencies.

(In many ways, 1980s Usenet was the equivalent of edu-only Facebook. Think through that a few times.)

Usenet had many useful features ... and failings. Much of Usenet's decentralisation and client-independence meant that bad nodes, general adversaries, and flouting of tradition (the Eternal September, spammers, AOL, ...) could destroy it.

Usenet had little to no archival, filtering, or spam protections. There were attempts to bolt on solutions. Those ... fared poorly in general, either in effectiveness or unintended consequences.

In spirit and role, the closest thing to Usenet for the moment is probably Reddit. For anyone interested in my views on Reddit, see the recent and pinned posts in https://old.reddit/r/dredmorbius

Much of Usenet's early success was a direct result of its institutional foundation: selective-admissions, computer-science-heavy research universities. Those had a group-communications problem, and could support the infrastructure for a solution, but couldn't scale appreciably beyond the million or so member community of late 1980s / early 1990s Usenet. Today's Internet is global, is non-selective, has no common culture (other than, perhaps, advertising and other forms of behavioural manipulation), and no domimant institution (with the same exception). This bodes poorly for re-emergence of any Usenet-type mechanism.

Another chief problem is that static group forums have their own strengths and weaknesses, but among those is overhead and latency. This is exhibited on Usenet itself in the huge land-rush of newsgroups defined when world+dog decided that they had to be there ... most of which turned into unmoderated and unused wastelands, either flooded with spam or entirely empty. Slapping labels on room plaques does not a community make.

You can still spin up your own limited-access NNTP server, and run email and Web-based gateways. I've been active on the Fediverse for over a decade (Diaspora, Mastodon), and though there's some similarities, and considerable shared individuals, the scope is not the same, and group discussion in particular is ... not well-facilitated. (There are bolt-ons, e.g., gup.pe on Mastodon.)

Email lists and IRC (which does* support pretty flexible temporary channel creation) are other options, both of which afford control and free-flowing forum characteristics.

Urbit.