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?
Usenet arose during a time when the people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them. Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
If it’s not on a touchscreen, and not able to be done with 2 or 3 taps, then it ain’t happening.
Expanding on this, I’m worried a technological education gap is forming among the youth. Old people didnt grow up with computers, they have an excuse. Middle aged people had to deal with the computers of the 80s and 90s, and because of that, understand computing pretty well. Young people were born into a world of instant gratification and super simplified touchscreen GUI interfaces, and from talking with them, it’s clear most of them know how to get on the internet and do their thing on social media, but most of them have no clue how the nuts and bolts of it all work.
Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
This is not true at all. People download phone clients all the time. And there were also Usenet web clients. Subscribing to newsgroups is exactly the same as subscribing to subreddets or kbin magazines. And you have to pick a server for Fedverse also, but the the Usenet server doesn’t matter at all like a Fedverse server does.
The only reason people don’t use Usenet is because the free servers disappeared and ISPs no longer provided it with your internet service.
Yes. plenty of articles coming out about how many in gen z are technology illiterate. I am started to see it at my workplace since we hire a lot of fresh college grads. getting more support calls for completely inane stuff that shows the person has zero basic technological knowledge, like the type of stuff that my you see from boomers. and often it’s the issue is simple the user doing things wrong and refusing to understand or learn to do them correctly, like a boomer.
it’s wild to think a 22yo is incompetent at basic computer skills, but like you said, all they do is social media crap on their phones. they have no idea how to actually work with PC/Mac applications, let alone solve basic problems or change settings.
This is why I try to involve my 5 year old god daughter in whatever tech project I’m working on whenever she’s over. I also have a bunch of edutainment games running on my Windows 98 PC that she plays. She knows how to use a keyboard and mouse, which puts her well ahead of her peers from what I understand.
I’ve only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands “minecraft” to be an adjective meaning “that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic”, it’s adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.
Maybe it’s time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age
Ah yes, Usenet was the original Fediverse. Kind of. It was more of a distributed peer-to-peer system than the current day ActivityPub. I loved it back when it was mainly discussion and the .binaries groups were an awkward sideshow. Reddit filled that niche in terms of its actual function, but I always knew the underlying centralized structure of Reddit would someday be its downfall.
The sad thing is that back when it first began Reddit was actually planning on being federated too. They released their server as open source and had plans to make it able to interact with other Reddit servers. Never came to fruition.
They even paid someone to design a semi-monetary points system and then scrapped it…
Usenet was the first time I interacted with the internet as it was the only thing accessible from the Unix lab we had access to (email was available but we didn’t use it). This was 1994. I was on alt.music.pink-floyd during the height of the PUBLIUS ENIGMA puzzle.
I kept using it up into the early 2000s. I’d jump on in the morning before going to work, and that’s how I found out about 9/11 (it was 12:46am NZ time when the first tower was hit). I had gone to our local newsgroup for our city and there were messages in all caps “TOWER COLLAPSED” and then “BOTH TOWERS DOWN”. I wondered what was going on, then turned on the TV where our main channel was feeding in the live news (I think it was CNN). We just sat there horrified, watching before we eventually went off to work.
I eventually stopped using it when web forums and other sites took over for me (fark, slashdot, metafilter) and then my ISP dropped support for it. Google Groups didn’t mesh with me and I never went back.
When I first jumped on here and got my head around federation, it took me back to those Usenet days because in a sense this is almost the same. I’ve seen lots of people say “federation is like email”, but to me it’s like Usenet.
I’ve seen lots of people say “federation is like email”, but to me it’s like Usenet.
It is a lot like Usenet, but Usenet has some superior features.
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Discussion groups are automatically merged across all servers. So it is decentralized but does not feel decentralized.
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Newreaders only show you content that you have not already read/seen
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Readers let you kill articles in subscribed newsgroups and threads within subscribed newsgroup articles so that you don’t see them in the future.
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