Usenet is unmoderated. Once you post it, it sticks forever. We could probably get one of the independent providers to give free access to a new newsgroup. Anyone have any thoughts?

I’ve used Usenet for my content needs for years because it’s so fast and risk free. I think we could also use it for our community discussions.

  • Usenet is a very old part of the internet. I think it predates the world wide web. It’s basically a message board. Which boards (like subs) exist on there is democratically decided. At least that was how it was done in Germany. For example, when there where too many Star Wars posts in the Science Fiction group de.rec.sf they decided to create one for Star Wars under de.rec.sf.starwars.

    The actual content resides on newsservers around the globe. When you pass a message to one of them it is distributed around the globe to all the other servers. It’s similar to how Lemmy works, with the difference that with Lemmy content is only passed around when someone is actually subscribed to a particular community.

    But many news servers don’t pass around messages that contain files. Because that would take up too much space. To get access to the servers that do pass around files you have to pay for the service. That is actually used for piracy nowadays.

    Back in the days you could actually get access to usenet from your ISP. At least to the text only portion. Don’t know how you’d do it nowadays. It’s mostly fallen to obscurity.