Stop Electron, stop using a browser as if it was an Operating System!!! Go #terminal#cli#TUI use your OS, not the browser for everything! And be liter, more ethical, your computer will love you! Use #Gemini#gopher#usenet#matrix#fediverse on TUI apps #vim#neovim as your text/IDE #mpv for videos and more... !!!
Also fiddling with my #hamster configuration. Originally I just wanted it as a replacement for the leafnode #usenet proxy server on my windows machine, but #thunderbird and #Gmail are making enough problems lately that I wonder if using it as a proxy mail server wouldn't also be reasonable.
I mean, the program is like 5 mb in size, which 20 years ago might have been sizeable, but right now is a drop in the bucket.
In July 1999, someone stole a trailer jammed with Sonic Youth gear out of a Ramada Inn parking lot. Lee Ranaldo immediately sent an email that was reposted to alt.music.sonic-youth:
> Please no pranks, all, this is really serious--
> all the gear we've used to write our last few LPs
> worth of stuff, instruments used for songs old
> and new which if truly lost will mean those songs
> will be lost forever.
Rereading @pluralistic 's "Little Brother" last week brought back great memories of staying up way too late at night reading #USENET#HOWTO s and #FAQ s .. and then doing some sketchy shit with #linux
I saw on #usenet under the #gemini protocol newsgroup (REAL GEMINI NOT SHIT GOOGLE CRAP) that someone created a guestbook like we used to have back in the day under #gemini very cool indeed! <3
@rss feeds on #usenet <3 with #slrn on the #hispagatos usenet server, part of the new usenet with no binaries, only plain text, no spam, no google only hobbiest, hackers, tinkers and awesome people.
Installed Hamster as a local #usenet server on my windows laptop. It works, is pretty simple to set up, and has a very late-90s aesthetic for the whole program that I thought we left behind in that decade with Pogs and a vague sense of optimism towards the future.
It is rather dense in its particulars though. My current issue: how exactly do I pull news automatically?
I assume it's possible, but I might have to write a script to do it.
The app is written for dial-up internet.
Wenn ich an den Föderationsgedanken denke, fühle ich mich an zwei Ansätze erinnert: #Gravatar als plattformübergreifender "Avatar", und im Blick auf Mastodon an die alten BBS/Mailbox Zeiten... Da gab es die lokale Box, und darüber hinaus konnte man ggf. ins #Usenet gehen... #Fidonet sage ich an dieser Stelle.
My family #email server got put onto several DNS blocklists yesterday because someone submitted a posting with a fake return address to the #Usenet newsgroup whose moderation software runs on my server, and the "fake" return address they used (@NOSPAMgmail.com) is actually a spam-trap, so when my server tried to send them email acknowledging their submission I got blocklisted.
The spamtrap in question charges money for delisting. Fuck that noise. #it
😡
I keep thinking how much more logical #usenet would be if someone actually had created local hierarchies like they exist for a few places. there's a france. hierarchy which has groups for all kinds of places in the country.
instead some places, esp. in Germany have hierarchies for themselves (like nbg. or bln.) while Austria has at. and oesterreich., UK has both uk. and england. etc.
but barely anyone is using these by now anyway, so it's a moot point.
So, for awhile I've been slowly conducting oral histories with queer folks from the early Internet, a project I've called Read/Write Memories (https://queerdigital.com/rwm)
I'm happy to announce that the first of these histories, with narrator Max Vasilatos, is finally available! Max was the "co-founder" of the first gay newsgroup on Usenet, soc.motss, and they had many wonderful reflections on the community's early years and its legacy. https://queerdigital.com/items/show/138
ok, since I am still waiting for my Usenet account (via solene), my first attempt at gnus-ing my emacs is via nnhackernews.
Since hackernews is already threaded, it works charmingly well.
Dickmao made a twitter backend for nus, so perhaps I will be able to find an activitypub one? One thing I don't like about Mastodon is the general idea - a flow of posts, all with hidden hierarchy. Having this in a threaded UI would make it a million times better. Maybe one day :)
hmm. it might just me overthinking things, but it feels like #usenet discussions have in fact picked up a bit ever since Google cut the cord.
I do encounter more different names in the groups I post in. (mostly #ttrpg groups though)
If you want your posts to be visible, use hashtags. This is more important here than anywhere else, because there is no cross-instance full-text search. And people do follow hashtags.
In my experience well-hashtagged posts get half of their interactions from people who don't follow me.
one thing that's nice about #usenet right now is that after google dropped the support for it all the spam seems to have disappeared and all the actual posters are still there.
really telling in how much of a problem Google Groups actually was.
So, nach > 10 "荒 ら し dot com" #Spam habe ich jetzt erst mal einen Filter auf diesen Käse eingerichtet. Ich kann kein Japanisch und Google Translate konnte mir die Bedeutung der Webseite auch nicht erschließen. Ich seh schon, das #Fediverse braucht ein Cleanfeed wie damals im #Usenet.
#usenet question for the graybeards out there: who owned that data? With reddit, fb, twtr and son it's clear. With a personal site it's clear. But what about usenet groups?
With peeps talking about a "revival of the old web" lately, I wonder if anyone is returning to Usenet. It's littered with binaries and spam, but still, somewhere small communities must still thrive?
@pixelambacht (late response, but in case it still interests you:)
For many years now, I've been using text-only news servers, so I don't see binaries (but maybe some servers filter these differently?). Spam got worse in the second half of 2023 but Google was to blame for that and they disconnected Groups from USENET a couple weeks ago.
And yes, some people are still using it, although it will of course depend on the group. An example: alt.folklore.computers is active :-)