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?
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.
good riddance.
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.
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!
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 !thunderbird@lemmy.world, 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.
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 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 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.
My ICQ UIN is only 7 digits
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.
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.
[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.
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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?
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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.
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.
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.
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
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
It’s not text only if you have UUDecode.
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.
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.
It’s not a competitor, no.
No offense to the fediverse, but I think usenet was first
That’s what the title of the post says.
To be fair it calls usenet the original gangster
Are you playing dumb or do you really not know the colloquial use of that?
Correct
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.
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.
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