while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.
i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.
some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.
best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.
i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎
Someone kicked a decade of seminal pre-internet communications off the internet.
We all know Google Search has seriously degraded, with tons of duplicate and garbage content from content farms (which I’m sure carry lots of Google ads, so perhaps they don’t care—we're not the customer). But also, searching for my own name (which is globally unique) no longer returns nearly as much as it used to. It used to have hundreds if not thousands of hits to various mailing lists archives, not to mention old Usenet posts, and everything I've written online since.
So for fun, I did a search and ran down the list. Basically, after about 44 results, it’s just a mix of Mastodon posts (often reshares, and not including my profile), an occasional random mailing list post, and references to my megapost on Pseudonyms from the Google+ nymwars.
But here’s the shocker.
The Usenet results are gone.
When I set the date restrictions on my name search, I can’t find anything before 1992. Some of that is because individual articles aren’t being stored on web sites anymore, and the few mailing list archives don’t have dates that Google recognizes. And I thought maybe that was the case for Usenet as well, but nope. It’s been removed from the internet because of some asshole apparently went after them with lawyers to get something redacted. I used to be able to search for things I wrote back in the early 80’s. But no longer.
That’s painful. An important part of internet history erased. (I know, people have private copies of the archive, I even know some of them, but that’s not the same).
For what it’s worth. This is what I got from Google. And there’s more details on the UtZoo Usenet archive at the bottom of this post. There's no blog posts of mine here because they are all offline right now, but I'll fix that soon. Those will go back to 1997.
The weighting here is very biased towards commercial walled gardens. It's clearly no longer based on references from other sites, or my Pseudonym megapost would be much higher. It's based on status of web sites, not content. It's biased against content.
LinkedIn
Instagram
Academia.edu
Flickr (haven't posted anything there in years)
YouTube (ditto)
www.Pinterest (very ditto, not sure I've ever posted anything there)
Quora (ditto)
Apollo.io (scraped from LinkedIn, well done Google)
<break for some images, all actually mine>
Usenix.org (paper I'm listed as a co-author on)
Goodreads
GitHub
Facebook
Foursquare (ancient)
W3C.org (mailing list post from 1996...the first hit that I'd consider old-style internet content)
Gawker (article about a blog post I made about a Sarah Lacy interview with Zuck a long time ago—I mapped twitter sentiment to the video to the interview)
ThreadReaderApp (some of my twitter threads)
Palmer House Inn (article about Sandy Neck Lighthouse that mentions me)
Infosec Exchange (finally, Mastodon, my most active social media)
opensource.apple.com (some code I wrote a very long time ago)
tr.pinterest (WTF google? Again?)
Tribute Archive (my aunt's obit)
PCWorld on abcnews.go.com (mention of a blog post I wrote analyzing the Google Orkut worm--remember Orkut?)
blogs.gnome.org (kurt von finck's blog referencing a tiny blog post I made about being in Maine)
perl.apache.org (changelog for Embperl mentioning a bug I reported)
Stack Overflow (my home page, again, old)
ScienceDirect (description of a paper I wrote for INTERACT '87)
support.google.com (support question)
Ad, offering to search about info about me in Maine (presumably because that's my current location)
cohost.org (post, summary oddly pulls in the last sentence of my bio, which is mentions my daughter)
spaf.cerias.purdue.edu (Yucks Digest V2, a (true story) joke I posted to rec.humor.funny (Hi @spaf)
Birdeye.com, a review of their dog doors four years ago.
unice.fr (a copy of the emacs bindings I made for Mac text areas)
Forbes.com (a comment on an article about Dragon Systems, with the wrong summary)
IRTF Anti-spam Research Group thread (another mailing list archive)
UCLA (reference to the web version of Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater Digest that I maintained through 2004)
A reshared mastodon post about XYZ on DTSS
Another mastodon reshare
NetBSD (same software Apple had)
More Mastodon (this time my pixelfed account)
Playstation.net (copyright for same software again; in BSD libc)
perl.org (a mailing list post)
justia.com (a patent, the rest show up eventually elsewhere, very random)
tronche.com (Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual for X Version 11, R6. Thanks for being in the public review)
After that, it's basically Mastodon posts and occasional mailing lists, and some references to my megapost on Pseudonyms. I used to be able to find Usenet stuff using a date limit to the 80's, but not anymore. If I date limit, I find the earliest content is 1992 (A Google Groups post, a mention in the Motif Programming Manual ("just because he's cool" 🤣)), and more copies of the ICCCM manual.
Searching for my name and “usenet” gets a usenet search engine, which does not appear to be working. http://benschmidt.org/usenet/, the reason becomes clear…
Looking at archive.org/usenet, I find the quote below. As of 2020, they are offline. WTF?
> This is not a collection of the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive.
>
> In 2020 after sustained legal demands requesting a set of messages within the Usenet Archive be redacted, and to avoid further costs and accusations of manipulation should those demands be met, the archive has been removed from this URL and is not currently accessible to the public.
>
> Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums of the removed files, for the use of others in verifying they have original materials.
No wonder it's not in search anymore. What the fuck.
If I search for "apollo!nazgul", I only find 7 results.
A decade of my life, of many people's lives, got erased from the internet.
Hmm... It appears that discussion about the possibility of federating between #ActivityPub and #Usenet has begun. I'd love to see groups on #Lemmy instances share content with Usenet, thus bringing it into the #Fediverse.
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with […]
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
Admittedly in a much diminished state than at it’s heyday.
I don’t know if you ever heard the term Usenet before, and even if you did, if you don’t just connect it with data piracy. Because that’s what it is mostly used for nowadays.
What it started out as were discussion forums.
Back in the late 70s, after ARPANET had been created and email had been invented, a few programmers came up with an idea for an electronic bulletin board that could be read asynchronously. This was the time when computers still were only in big institutions like universities, big companies, and the military, and the whole idea was to create “a poor man’s ARPANET”. Connections between computers were rare and expensive , but possible. So these “news” started as a way to propagate articles and messages along servers that were not constantly connected to the internet. Some of the servers involved would only connect once a day to the network to transfer messages in and out (often at night because charges were lower then). A message might travel for multiple days before it reached all nodes in the network, and some of the earliest were messages about a nascent hobby popular among the people using this network: fantasy role-playing.
From what I can see the first two messages on the brand new group net.games.frp were sent out on the 12th of January 1982.
To give you an idea just how early this was: it was before the abbreviation RPG became common, people were still talking about Fantasy RolePlaying instead, so even today the group-names use the abbreviation FRP.
It’s quite a fascinating system that over time has become ever more complex and popular, before the ascent of html, hyperlinks, and the world wide web pushed it into the seedy corners of the ‘net.
Instead of having websites, Usenet is organized in newsgroups, and those groups are organized in hierarchies. There are the so called Big Eight that have a certain standard for group creation and posting (e.g. rec. for recreational topics, and comp. for topics concerning computers), and there are others, organized in one way or another (famously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.*_hierarchy which had lower standards for the creation of new groups).
Messages are sent to one or more groups (crossposted), distributed around the network, and people respond to these posts. Interesting discussions and arguments ensue, people get angry, flame wars ensue, other people learn something new, weird in-jokes develop, stuff happens.
All that can be read via archives, the biggest of which is Google Groups, which both is a boon and downfall of the service: Google purchased the old newsgroup archives of DejaNews back in the 90s, and integrated it in it’s Google Groups service. In a picture-perfect example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the users of Groups had a web interface that allowed them access to their old newsgroups, access to new groups that only existed on Google, but also allowed spammers to flood the connected newsgroups with loads of unmoderated spam. Spam that recently was quoted by them as a reason to cut the connection with Usenet, bringing this phase of the network to an end.
But Usenet still is running, and most likely will be running as long as there are people willing to run servers for it. But the biggest Usenet servers nowadays are piracy servers that keep the text-part of the Usenet as more of an afterthought. At one point someone came up with a way to use the text-only format of Usenet in a way to distribute data that was binary, i.e. not purely text. And this took over most of the system.
But I am not really interested in that and never was. What I am interested in are the fantasy roleplaying parts of that network.
rec.games.frp.*
I said that the forum has been running since the late 70s, but that’s not quite correct. The original structure of Usenet grew organically from the beginning. People were creating new groups when it suited them and it seemed logical. Which soon caused some hierarchies (specifically the net. hierarchy) to swell with groups that could barely be maintained. In a great upheaval in 1987 all the groups were renamed and restructured.
Some old hands are still angry about it and will bitch about it for days. That also is Usenet.
One can argue that the fantasy roleplaying group has existed since before that time. One also could argue that it only exists since 1987. Which still is older than the World Wide Web.
Usenet is divided into hierarchies, and the frp-hierarchy is part of the rec. (recreation-hierarchy) and .games. sub-hierarchy.
There are currently 11 .frp. groups in that hierarchy:
rec.games.frp.dnd
of course… it’s the hierarchy for Dungeons and Dragons. Always one of the biggest topics of the whole FRP forums this one got it’s own group.
rec.games.frp.misc
for basically all other kinds of discussions about roleplaying games
rec.games.frp.cyber
for cyberpunk systems (e.g. Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun).
rec.games.frp.super-heroes
for superhero games
rec.games.frp.live-action
anything LARP goes here.
rec.games.frp.announce
announcements and news about products go here
rec.games.frp.industry
for all kinds of discussions about the rpg industry
rec.games.frp.storyteller
yes, this was created when the World of Darkness was big enough to demand it’s own forum
rec.games.frp.gurps
For GURPS, this part was created because while never the most popular game, it’s fans flooded the main group with so many messages about builds that it was decided to give them their own place.
rec.games.frp.advocacy
all kinds of discussions about roleplaying games as such and how they work. This is where the Forge came from back in the day
rec.games.frp.market
I guess this is for selling stuff. I have literally never seen a message in there.
Most of these lay fallow right now, with me and a few others being the only ones posting there every once in a while. I do have to admit part of it is because I don’t want to lose the that part of ttrpg history to a random deletion request for non-use.
Other TTRPG groups
The main hierarchies are not the only ones. Most normal Usenet servers carry at least the Big Eight, but most also carry others. The big other hierarchy is alt. (…definitely not named for Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists, all evidence to the contrary…), which makes it easier to create groups. This means there are a few other groups here that might be of interest, if they ever would get someone to post in them. Their structure though is not as organized as the ones in the Big 8.
alt.games.frp.adnd-util
about utilities for playing ADnD. I would say, a general groups for RPG utilities.
alt.games.adnd
for ADnD. I am not sure why this exists, maybe because the main one was too stodgy, or it was created because someone thought ADnD was sufficiently different than DnD to warrant it’s own group
alt.games.earthdawn
for Earthdawn. Remember Earthdawn?
alt.games.x-files.rpg
For the X-Files RPG. Remember that?
alt.games.whitewolf
I guess a group for White Wolf games, which is also already covered in rec.games.frp.storyteller
alt.games.tolkien.rpg
a group about playing in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth
There are also local and language dependent groups around. Many languages and regions have their own hierarchies for exchanges between locals and/or in other languages.
uk.games.roleplay
group for roleplaying in the UK
de.rec.spiele.rpg.misc
general group for discussions of RPGs in German
z-netz.freizeit.rollenspiele.dsa
originally this was an Echo in a mailbox network, by now z-netz. is a small alternative German Usenet hierarchy. This particular one about Das Schwarze Auge/The Dark Eye
pl.rec.gry.rpg
Polish-language group
es.rec.juegos.rol
Spanish-language group
se.spel.rollspel
Swedish-language group
dk.fritid.rollespil
Danish-language group
fr.rec.jeux.jdf
French-language group
it.hobby.giochi.gdr
Italian-language group
hr.rec.igre.rpg
Hungarian-language group
aus.games.roleplay
Australian group
There are more, some of which I might not even find that easy because they are not on the servers I frequent (not all servers carry all groups) or are so specialized they might not be of interest to anyone but locals (e.g. saar.rec.rollenspiele exists, but I doubt many people in Saarland (the smallest of Germany’s federal states) still know Usenet exists)
Ok, ok, but how do you actually ACCESS this Usenet thingy?
That’s a bit more difficult, but not much. It used to be ISPs were all running their own news servers, this was actually the REASON you might want internet access as a private person, but that isn’t the case anymore. Google Groups is also going away, so that’s not a real option.
An easy way to check out what is being talked about on the FRP-hierarchy is campaignwiki.org/news. This server makes it possible to read and post on his own small server via a web-interface. The server is only running roleplaying-related groups, including the global FRP-hierarchy, and a few local ones that do not get carried in many other places.
Another way to access it via web browser is via web gateways. There are a few around, e.g. NovaBBS. There are a few of those around, but they might not carry all the groups (NovaBBS e.g. only rec.games.frp.dnd and .misc, because those are the ones with most activity).
The proper way to use it is of course by getting an account on a news server and adding it to your feed reader of choice. True hardcore users use terminal-based readers like tin or Gnus, but many Email programs like Mozilla Thunderbirdallow you to subscribe to newsgroups.
Most of these have instructions on how to connect on their websites.
Note: This is a redo of an article I wrote 13 years ago. Originally I thought I could just let that one stand like that, but just briefly reading through it I noticed things had changed dramatically in some areas. So I rewrote the whole thing from scratch.
Did you know there is an online forum for tabletop role-playing games that has been around since the early 80s, and which still is active and operating? Admittedly in a much diminished state than a…
Mastodon seems to be a lot more fragile than USENET; the whole PubSub thing seems to assume better connectivity than old-style distribution permits
This blog has been offline from ActivityPub / Fediverse for a few days, due to a bug in the WordPress Supercache plugin regarding (not) honouring the HTTP Accept header.
Back in the days of USENET, a node going offline for that length of time would not be a huge problem; the articles would be pushed or offered downstream to other peers, and dropped if they were deemed too stale (generally 1 week, often more) and all that would happen is a brief spike.
Yes, it’s a different world with different choices Alec, blah blah blah blah blah, but I am not impressed. If the ActivityPub architectures are not tuned in the expectations of delivering robustness of communication in the face of outages, it is going to (for instance) lose all account of protests in <some oppressive regime> where the in-country instances can only achieve intermittent connectivity in the face of state attempts to block communication.
It could be WordPress at fault, it could be Mastodon, it could be the ActivityPub spec or the recommended timeouts or who knows what cause; I cannot say and I am also not going to be the one to fix it because I also have bigger fish to fry.
But nor am I going to leave this issue unobserved. We need to talk about weakness in order to have it addressed.
Not surprising news for gray-haired social-media veterans, but it still has end-of-an-era vibes: Google Groups to drop most #Usenet support on Feb. 22, keeping only a read-only archive of pre-2/22/2024 posts. https://support.google.com/groups/answer/11036538
I'm happy there's renewed activity around Usenet, such as a new management committee and group maintenance to remove obsolete groups and create new ones.
i can't believe i'm saying this - i just realized that i want #usenet groups back.
edit: before i get more replies, i've been a usenet user/subscriber for 30 years, and i still use it daily. i'm very aware that it's still in heavy usage.
to clarify - I'd like to see a usenet back, minus the "big 8" cabal, minus 200TB / day binaries, and all of the ugly crap we've seen since the 80s.
i'd like to see something like a new usenet offering activitypub integration, minimal data transfer (text-only), and easy group management.
"#USENET, or NetNews, is a text-only social discussions forum, or rather a set of a great many forums, called "newsgroups," carried by multiple servers around the world. Although the original developers closed down their instance in 2010, that was just one server out of hundreds, and many are still running just fine. It never went away – it's still alive, you can get on it for free, and there is a choice of client apps for most OSes to help you navigate."
The Oldest TTRPG Forum on the Net (gmkeros.wordpress.com)
Did you know there is an online forum for tabletop role-playing games that has been around since the early 80s, and which still is active and operating? Admittedly in a much diminished state than a…