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Date: 2024-05-15 23:13
I recently purchased a block account with Usenet access, giving me 5GB of Usenet traffic for just 3 dollars US, which ends up at about £2.49.
I had read all about Usenet and thought it was a really cool proposition with a lot of history, and I had really wanted to access it. That is what prompted my purchase decision.
Unfortunately, I had made two mistakes. The first being that I hadn't used Eternal September to get free text-only Usenet access. The other mistake was thinking the Usenet landscape hadn't shifted in the past 10 years.
Usenet is arguably the oldest communications protocol ever. It predates IRC, BBS, and the world wide web in terms of providing users with communication between networked computers. It is both historically and culturally significant, as a lot of terminology and etiquette now found on forums (the BBS' Web-based successor) and social media like Reddit. While initially only for researchers in universities, it eventually opened up to the public, and became very popular.
You connect to a news server, which can, in itself, share news with other news servers. This provides a decentralised method of sharing news that offers the same benefits that the Fediverse brings to social media, including increased resiliency and a lack of censorship. Messages work very similarly to email (in fact, Usenet and email co-operate with each other in a way, as most clients also send replies to posts as emails).
The end result is similar to a mailing list, except all of this happens on a separate network of servers to email, and it uses newsgroups instead of email addresses.
Oh, yeah, about newsgroups. Essentially, it's like DNS but backwards, meaning you get something like comp.lang.c, where the highest level for the hierarchy is at the start. It's arguably more logical than DNS, since the top level is seen first, but nobody cares about that.
The first thing I did after creating an account with Usenet-News was search for a client. As much as I wanted to use slrn, it would always refuse to compile, no matter what I tried, so I ended up using Mozilla Thunderbird. It's an all-in-one communications tool, although I would only truly recommend the email component, as well as the RSS reader. Both in one place is tantalising.
Next, I searched for some newsgroups to join. I joined a lot of them (I'm subscribed to over 100 at this point, even though 90% of them are dead). However, this is where the first problem occured.
Seriously. There must be thousands available on Usenet-News, and it was hard to know which ones were the most subscribed, which ones were once popular, and which ones were unmoderated hellscapes. So, I just ended up subscribing to as many as possible. That ended up becoming a bit of a problem, as you shall soon see, but it is manageable.
Unfortunately, many newsgroups are entirely abandoned. Some haven't seen any discussion in well over a decade, and some only see discussion in the form of advertisements for DMT vape pens (no, really). I ended up seeing the same four messages appear in many, many newsgroups as the most recent one, like a plague doctor announcing the newsgroups' deaths.
There were arguably multiple stages to Usenet's death. The first was the rise of social media. People moved to that instead of Usenet, because it made Usenet look like a nerd's toy in comparison. It was modern, easy to use, and centralised, meaning anyone could start using it. It was seen as superior.
The second stage was the shift towards using Usenet as a decentralised host for binaries. The alt.binaries newsgroup turned into one of the largest hierarchies in the entire network, with hundreds of newsgroups inside of alt.binaries.*. This ballooned traffic and bandwidth requirements for hosting Usenet. This caused loads of ISPs to stop offering Usenet as part of their Internet plans, because costs had massively increased and usage had massively decreased. Shutdown after shutdown of news servers shrank the pool of remaining users even more, since you now had to pay to access Usenet, especially if you wanted binaries, which more and more people wanted, as they saw it as a BitTorrent alternative, as more and more providers advertised binary retentions as selling points.
The final stage occured in early 2024. Google announced that Google Groups would no longer send or receive any more Usenet traffic, leaving it as nothing more than an archive. Suddenly, a lot of users had nowhere to go, so they left Usenet forever. A truly sorry state of affairs.
Usenet also suffers from a spam problem. Because spam protection happens at the server level, the only thing that servers can do is delete the spam either before it is posted, meaning badly configured news servers are used as spam spewers, with the rest of the linked servers happily sharing the news items with each other. This is a problem that can be solved by means of proper moderation and working to collectively ignore news servers facilitating this spam, but not enough people are left on Usenet to care anymore.
Well, mainly what we can do is get more people using Usenet. As much as this post is negative about it, I really like Usenet as a concept, and I will actively participate in it. To solve the issue of the lack of posts, you go into Usenet and make a post. To solve the spam issue, we as a collective work together to find solutions, as us humans have done for millenia. Usenet can be a wonderful place to be, so let us do that, shall we?
A good place to start would be my list of links for Usenet, including clients and providers you can use, and newsgroups you can join. I'd like to draw your attention to Eternal September, who offer free Usenet access for text-only channels, both reading and writing. Make an account, join some newsgroups, and start posting!