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?
One of the many reasons I love #usenet all the #hackers are still #hackers with
out all the cry babys in the http space! fuck google get out of our usenet!
Internet archives are amazing and under-appreciated.
I searched a #Usenet archive for a program I'd written decades ago in high school: an interpreter for the Karel programming language for use in intro CS classes. Because wonderful people have maintained those archives for many years, I was able to find my program 40 years after I wrote it. https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=net.sources&mid=PDI5OUBzcG9jay5VVUNQPg
ugh, in the end I decided Synchronet BBS really wasn't doing what I wanted the way I wanted it. now installing separate services on the machine instead.
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 :-)