• frezik@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • yukichigai@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • 6daemonbag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Pantoffel@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Oh world, that itching in my fingers! Some FOSS client for android that you can recommend?

      • SirQuackTheDuck@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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!

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      it’s interesting bullshit 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.

  • totallynotfbi@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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

    • hh93@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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…

    • nucleative@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Marruk@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        OG Travian was the shit. I made a lot of friends there that persisted long after I left the game.

        • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • Prinny@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

          • veng@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

          • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            The ones surrounding popular open-source projects are often quite active.

  • IHeartBadCode@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • TheEntity@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      [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.

      • krash@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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)

    • yukichigai@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Funnily enough I was toying with the idea of making a Gopher based Lemmy frontend for the lulz. Maybe Gemini then?

    • TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • dan1101@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • yukichigai@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • S_H_K@lemmy.fmhy.net
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    1 year ago

    Stupid question of the day does this compete with the fediverse or it goes along it? Not pointing fingers just curious.

    • netburnr@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Federation of usenet required either a peering link or scripting to pull down all new articles, it isn’t automatically done, like Lemmy

      • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • knotthatone@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • darreninthenet@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.