[RileyJames]

I’ve heard of Usenet, but never used it. It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents, but I don’t get the vibe that’s the primary use case.

What can I do with Usenet?

The internet has become so boring, I’d be open to exploring something else, but I’ve got no idea what Usenet is.

[wakeupcall]

Usetnet was (technically still is) essentially decentralized text-only reddit, with an open protocol and a client you can choose. You can post/read on a global network. The problem is that very few groups are still active and probably dying.

Back in the day ISPs would give you an email account, some static web space accessible via FTP and access to the local NNTP (usenet) server as standard, which is why it was popular. usenet servers were peered with each other, sharing a large global namespace (servers could have local-only groups too, but that's a detail).

At the beginning, most of the online discussions happened there.

As open-source development grew, the main issue was that creating and getting approval for a group was bureaucratic/complicated and slow. As this was global and automatically peered, there was also a "minimum" number of requests to be eligible. For this reason, small groups started to move to mailing lists instead which didn't require special approval and became the new de-facto standard.

For a long time, bi-directional nntp<>mailing list software was standard for large lists. nntp clients were always designed to work with huge amount of messages efficiently compared to mail clients. I was following hundreds of groups at the time, and I still consider nntp fantastic from the user perspective.

Spam and trolls were another problem with such a public global network. Policing was hard. This is just a very short summary (it ignores completely the problem of piracy/warez and the binary split..)

[thaumasiotes]

I'm open to correction, but I believe it's essentially a bunch of email lists. You can post to rec.games.roguelike.angband, your message will go to a server somewhere (theoretically, to every Usenet provider), and people who want to discuss, or read discussion of, Angband, can ask that server for the set of messages associated with rec.games.roguelike.angband.

So email, if you sent mail to topics rather than to recipients.

[usrusr]

I've always assumed (never looked into it) that the protocol itself has little in common with SMTP. But the constraints of text-only messages (email before html formatting took hold), email address as user ID and client software that used the same UI for both (Netscape Navigator!) certainly made it feel like very much the same thing. Mailing lists, but more federated than irc.

One difference to mailing lists of more recent times, besides technological differences, is that there was more of a sense of shared culture across groups. Groups certainly differed (some topics might have even had parallel groups in regular and in alt.* hierarchies?), but not even remotely as much as mailing lists differ. Certainly more free for all babble (because it was) than the more moderated or even announcement-only end of the mailing list spectrum that is enabled by their centralised nature.

[SyberShock]

Usenet runs on the NNTP protocol. NNTP stands for "Network News Transfer Protocol." It is not a mailing list but many mailing list operators mirror their mailing lists in a NNTP newsgroup. This is done with a mail-to-news gateway script.

Usenet is typically accessed with a news reader application like Thunderbird. Thunderbird is not just a email client. It is also a news client that allows you to subscribe to and post to newsgroups.

[SyberShock]

> What can I do with Usenet?

You can enjoy threaded discussion in unmoderated groups without worrying about viewpoint censorship.

You can run your own NNTP peer and create your own newsgroups for your own community.

You can use a threaded newsreader application (like Thunderbird or Seamonkey or Claws Mail) which is much more efficient and organized than web forums.

> ... but I’ve got no idea what Usenet is.

You can start exploring Usenet here: https://news.novabbs.org

[Nursie]

> I’ve heard of Usenet, but never used it.

It was big in the 90s. Well, 'big'. Before we had forums. You can think of it like public email. You got access through a usenet server, often provided by your ISP or University, and it had groups for more or less everything going. Servers would peer the data between them, though server admins would often have a whitelist of groups that they would replicate.

Images were transferred on it much like embedded email images now - as uuencoded text. Base64 probably came in at some point, but you get the picture. There wasn't a lot in the way of video back then, few people had the bandwidth.

Groups had etiquette but I'm not sure how/if it could be enforced. The ultimate sanction was to put someone in your ignore file, and then you wouldn't see them any more.

Old usenet was largely inhabited by tech enthusiasts, students and academics. It is the place where flame-wars and trolling originated.

Two things killed the old usenet experience.

First there was the tradition of people who didn't know the etiquette flooding in every September with the new academic year. They would learn and participate better and settle in over a short while and order would be restored. When AOL gave newsgroup access, it was referred to as the September that never ended, and marked a downturn in the quality of discussion.

Second was spammers figuring out they could just flood the place, and so the merrily did, until it was basically useless and impossible to find actual conversation.

> It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents

Yeah so in the old binaries groups you could split videos over huge numbers of individual messages, tied together with identifiers in the titles, then reconstruct them. By the mid 00s this seemed to be the main use of usenet.

A file containing all of the message ids for a particular binary was called an 'nzb' and you could use that to grab the binary if you had a newsgroup server subscription and a program like sabnzbd. By that point most ISPs didn't give access to usenet any more, so you went through a third party. You could run a sort of trawler thing on groups you liked to build nzbs yourself, which used a lot of time and data, or you could subscribe to an nzb service. These survived for a while because a) fewer people used them and b) they made the same arguments as trackers - there's no content here, it's just an index.

'scene' videos would often get to usenet first, in fact usenet was often the source of the binaries which then made their way to the torrent services AFAICT.

For the casual consumer of pirated material it was probably legally safer than torrenting as you never uploaded anything.

[chx]

> in fact usenet was often the source of the binaries which then made their way to the torrent services

Nah, it was always topsites and I strongly suspect they still are.

[Nursie]

Yeah fair enough, they were/are the beating heart of the scene. I always assumed usenet was somehow 'closer' to the source than the public trackers, but :shrug:

[prox]

What is topsites?

[chx]

even twenty years after shutdown of the one I was ... hrm ... helping with ... I am reluctant to talk so please read https://www.wired.com/2005/01/topsite/ instead

[prox]

Thanks, this is going to be an interesting read!

[ogurechny]

In case you haven't noticed, the submitted link takes you to the web interface for a subset of groups on a personal usenet server, and it has some guides on using it.