I’ll start:
- RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
- XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
- IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
- Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn’t interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I’m not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn’t the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don’t know what is the correct approach. All I know is I’ve heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I’m super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I’m also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.
My choice is Vim and its variants. Add some plugins, it’s a really great way to write code. I have no interest in GUI IDEs anymore since getting my NeoVim installation set up and tuned.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn’t get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren’t installing their OS’ in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it’s one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
Yeah, they could have taken the high road compared to Google and Amazon, but instead were like: Hold my beer. And don’t get me started on smartphones, “smart” TV’s and cars… Wonderful times we’re living in!
True. The problem with that, is that Microsoft pays to have windows installed. Such that it’s actually cheaper to buy a system with windows and delete it than to buy one with Linux preinstalled.
Don’t forget the bloatware vendors that pay to be preinstalled.
Ah that’s probably how they’re able to squeeze Linux out of the market by having it OEM installed at cost.
Not that there are a lot of ordinary people who know what Linux is, much less desire to actively use it if it comes preinstalled on their machine.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
Yes, absolutely, but sadly the Steam Deck and S76 workstations are still niche products, focusing on the gaming and SoftDev markets.
Framework is very promising and I hope they’ll succeed breaking into more mainstream markets. But I’m really saddend by Canonical and that they dropped the ball with it because back in the day they made some attempts to partner with larger laptop vendors to pre-load Ubuntu and I think it also had great promise even tho Linux software was not nearly as refines as it is today. But nowadays when the software is much more capable they focus their efforts almost exclusively on business / server side applications.
Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.
Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux’s biggest misses recently. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.
The emerging immutable distros might be better positioned.
Yeah. When a Chromebook can satisfy the needs of a lot of users, I feel some distros were ready even a decade ago.
The installation step is a huge hurdle. I don’t know anyone, except techies, who has done it and even some techies haven’t. You can make it pretty (and some installers are both pretty and dead simple) but getting it on a thumb drive and booting from external media are just not user-friendly steps.
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn’t have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can’t be unlocked with biometrics?
Those aren’t “nice” features, they’re baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don’t just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn’t enough. And I’m not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.
I will always choose open source software over closed source software - but not if it means choosing mediocre software over good software.
At least with android 13, you can choose the bitwarden app as your default autofill option, and it will fill login info in apps/websites/etc. That being said, I’ve noticed sometimes it won’t pop up immediately, but it’s by far the minority of situations where it does that.
This has been a feature for years - Android 10 at least, if not earlier.
Ah okay, I was an apple/iOS user, first experience with Android has been 13. Thanks for the info!
On the app page Bitwarden has the typical biometric symbols. And other FOSS alternatives also have biometric unlock. I use Keepass for example. On my desktop computer it is pretty easy to fill in passwords in my browser and on my phone it is very easy to open the database via biometrics. However, non of the clients actually have a nice and shiny GUI…
That’s why I don’t suggest Keepass to people vs Bitwarden, even though it’s quote good, I know they’re gunna be put off instantly by Keepass’s ugly look.
Honestly though, all the mainstream password managers have pretty nasty looking interfaces IMO, so maybe it actually wouldn’t matter lol.
Bitwarden 100% has biometric unlock (at least on Android, can’t speak for other platforms); as mentioned by @pattern, you can set it up to autofill login info in apps and websites. It does sometimes take a bit of time to show up, though.
Anecdotal experience, I know, but I managed to cure my wife of her habit of storing passwords in plaintext on her computer by moving her to Bitwarden, and I’ve had very little in the way of tech support to deal with in that area ever since, so at least for me it passes the “good for non-tech savvy folks” test.
Huh, turns out it does now! Definitely didn’t when I last tried the desktop app.
FOSS is going to struggle to have good UX forever becuase you usually need one coherent vision for good UX and that’s the antithesis to FOSS projects, the only exceptions being ones run exclusively by one company.
I hope that this comes off as encouraging more than discouraging, but this lack of design and accessibility comes from the fact that it’s all volunteer work, and volunteers are going to prioritize what they need. The big companies don’t have smarter people working for them. They have money to spend on full-time developers (and designers, and writers, and…you get the idea) and someone at the top who wants to turn that investment into significantly more money by selling the software to people.
That’s a huge problem, because it puts up a wall between the people who do the work and people who just want to use the results of the work as the workers offered. And I don’t know how to fix that, other than to start making a bigger deal about the cultural aspects of Free Software. Like, a particular user may not care about how programmers develop the software, but by showing up and getting to know people, their one-off bug reports become something that people take seriously, because they know that person.
…But that obviously drifts further off topic.
Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite… how different those are.
And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can’t easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.
Discord servers are also closed communities which makes it impossible to search for info through search engine
Yep. It is a bit funny, and sad to see how we are regressing, despite the technology going forward…
There are opt in bots in deveopment that allows individual servers to be indexed for search engine visibility
Which you just know nobody is going to bother with installing on their guild.
It’s also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they’re mostly preserved for eternity.
Not to mention how crappy the linux client is for linux users (I use one of those “thirdparty” clients myself, since the linux client is unbearable)
trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
undefined> trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
I agree wholeheartedly, Discord is great for being a live chatroom, and for chatting over voice chat with friends, for any other purpose it is awful, and I am so baffled by so many product decisions to move to Discord. I feel like its a bunch of younger kids that played with their friends on it, and it has become the Hammer they use for every communication scenario, when most things are not nails.
I’m hoping Discord is passing phase I can largely ignore. I will deal with it if I need to but it seems like world of proprietary crapware.
Software, services come and go, so maybe, soon enough…
Forums and Wikis vs. Discord
Yes I know, they shouldn’t serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays
peoplecommunities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don’t understand the basics on how internet works.
To put it simply:
You can’t search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a “chat” search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.
Problem is that mostly those communities develop naturally and then there is a point where people join a discord and search years worth of discussion in multiple channels for some info.
This could of course have been a forum with threads all along but then users would have to create an account for all those niche forums… I get how this happens, but it still sucks.
And that is where activitypub is a godsend.
I’m thinking of a hacky solution where we have llms create a knowledge base for scraped discord data. Could be useful.
I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS’ map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.
Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
I think this is more of a problem of knowing when a specific tool should be used. Probably most people familiar with hadoop are aware of all the overhead it creates. At the same time you hit a point in dataset sizes (I guess even more with “real time” data processing) where it’s not even feasible with a single machine. (at the same time I’m not too knowledgeable about hadoop and bigdata, so anyone else feel free to chime in)
Some context though is that this article was written when cloud computing was all the buzz like crypto just was and AI is now. So many people used cloud just for the buzz and without understanding the tool (same with crypto and AI now)
I think you can put this under the Linux command line. I.E. the bash shell and the commonly installed Linux command set. Way powerful for certain things.
i3wm
It’s now more than a decade old and considered feature-complete 2 years back. But the basic usage is still the same since its initial launch. No matter how many versions of Windows or Gnome or KDE come and go, I use i3 in the same as I did when it launched. I don’t need “new” features because the existing features are more than enough.
I fell completely in love by the look and practicality of what i see and listen about i3wm. It all started when exploring unixporn on reddit.
It’s one of the things that make me sad for not being linux-savvy and even if I was I couldn’t use it for my daily driver because my company/team work is based on the whole Microsoft Office ecosystem.
So I just contemplate the minimalist beauty of it.
This. After the initial learning for i3wm I never looked back.
And I dread the times where I have to use something else (work environment…)
sway is the wayland based modern alternative that I use (and prefer). It does not do anything flashy and most i3 config options work just the same.
I’ve been thinking of switching to sway/hyprland but i3/x11 is not causing enough of a pain to justify the switch.
RSS was absolutely the shit
Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there’s some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.
That’s what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it’s easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It’s really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.
Not everyone is on twitter, but lots (all?) of Content Management Systems and blogs have a RSS feed.
As an academic, I’m syndicated to several labs and research groups which have their own websites, but don’t care about being visible on Twitter.
I’m not talking about CMS or blogs though, I mean individuals that are active on twitter. Redigit, the developer of Terraria doesn’t have an RSS feed but is active on twitter. Valheim devs often post sneak peaks of upcoming updates on their personal twitter accounts. Rebecca, creative director of warframe is active on twitter. Lots of twitch streamers or youtubers don’t have separate blog posts or sites, they just post on twitter about upcoming streams, videos or events. Webcomics and artists might have their own sites but generally its easier to discover new ones on twitter where they also often retweet other similar artists.
It’s probably different for academia and businesses but for me, a completely casual user that doesn’t contribute to twitter and instead just has a highly curated feed of things he likes, twitter was perfect before they started filling the feed with random crap I’m not even following. It doesn’t seem to me like RSS is a replacement for that.
What’s your setup? How do you aggregate different feeds to one page? Where do you find the feeds? I have so many RSS questions - everyone who uses it loves it and I want to understand it.
I use Feeder for Android and view everything from there. Notifies me of new posts. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
For like reddit I do https://teddit.net/r/[subreddit]?api&type=rss
For twitter I do https://nitter.net/[username]/rss
Can display things in groups or all together. Lists them chronologically. No need for an account. No need to visit the site.
Feedly is a pretty user friendly reader (but not open source, unfortunately).
All feed readers aggregate the results in one page if you want.
Most websites provide a feed (even YouTube channels), but it’s often hidden under the surface. You can inspect the page source, or you can pass the URL of the website to feedly (it’s usually able to find it for you).
The cool thing about RSS is that it’s open. If you don’t want to use a particular reader anymore, you can export your feeds as an opml file and import it in another reader. You’re not locked in.
Feedly rings a bell, I think I used to use it at some point. I don’t recall why I switched. I’ve been using Inoreader for some years, which does what I want well enough.
Reddit kinda replaced that for me. With leaving Reddit, just today I’ve installed a rss feed reader on my laptop and phone.
Still is.
Part of my rexxit so far has included me dusting off newsreaders and rss feeds again.
Im trying to find a good set up. Newsblur seems to be a front runner. I have nextcloud selfhosted, so I could use that with the $2.99 android app or I could pay for newsblur or feedly a few bucks each month.
Either way, having a self-curated feed of news these last few days has been pretty amazing. There is no algorithm tuned for engagement pumping news in my face. It’s just stories, articles, YouTube videos, and podcasts that I want to see (on my terms).
Fresh RSS is what I use, self hosted and the mobile web interface negates the need for an app. Though there is an app, I’m not a fan of it
After getting burned by Google killing Reader I decided to never use a 3rd party service again, and FreshRSS has served me well for years.
What I use as well it sgreat and I keep it open in a column on my side monitor all day so I can casually glance at the news whenever
any newsgroup recommendations?
You can self-host Newsblur, and the app is available on F-Droid
The no algorithm part is pretty neat. Don’t know if you are referring to the Nextcloud News app. If that’s the case, it’s free on the f-droid app store.
IS still absolutely the shit 🙂
Agree on RSS.
Don’t have enough experience with XMPP.
IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)
Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it’s what old school forums lacked.
The real problem with IRC had always been that it didn’t really scale. It’s fine for a few hundred people, but eventually shit just breaks.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 4•2 years ago
Undernet in its heyday supported tens of thousands of people. But yeah, a system that relays absolutely all messages to absolutely all nodes is going to fall over under the weight of billions of users.
audacity. that shit was mature in the 1990s.
What did happen to Audacity? I remember there was some controversy about them years back, but are they good now?
In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[53] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[54] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead. [55] Another controversy in July 2021[56] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would “occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA”.[57] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added “out of an abundance of caution.”[56]
There is a great chapter in the book “architecture of open source applications” dedicated to audacity! https://aosabook.org/en/v1/audacity.html
It’s still one of the first things I install
Audacity was probably, unknowingly, the first GPL program I directly used as a kid (as in, not a library or software on a server.) We had it on school computers and made silly voice recordings.
It was either that or Tux paint where we made silly drawings :)
I spent two (recent) years editing on Audacity before moving to a DAW.
Audacity still gets used often still because it’s just so much easier for tiny/terrible splice jobs
It’s hard to beat GIMP.
Hard to do anything with GIMP.
Jk
Kinda.
I’ve found that Krita is pretty easy to use and does most of the things I would otherwise have to use Photoshop for.
My kid uses krita with a drawing tablet, something I’m honestly not sure is even possible with gimp.
Seriously considering paying $10/mo for Photoshop just so I can replace my gimp with being encombured with bloat.
Check out Photopea
I mean, In general I hate the rent-your-software trend, but 10 bucks a month for Photoshop isn’t bad and the FOSS alternatives are just not up to snuff for anything other than the most basic of tasks. I’m saying this as somebody who struggled through learning The GIMP years before I ever got my hands on a copy of Photoshop.
As much as I want to love it, the UX oh the UX
Better than photoshop 1000x times
Idk, I only… Gimp along without Photoshop…
XMPP is very underappreciated.
Helpful Wikipedia link (for those like me who had no idea what XMPP was): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
It so is. The only protocol that might beat it once it gets a desktop client is SimpleX
I’m glad you mentioned SimpleX. I think it’s a really cool and promising idea, yet hardly anyone knows about it :(
On paper it was great, but in practice no one implemented it fully and while I don’t know why it is probably complicated.
Jabber was the way to go 10+ years ago but than everything stopped since no one managed to make clients for voice and video chat, than we just all dropped it.
I would call it big fail since it didn’t manage to materialize in usable form.
On the other hand, it is never too late to make new better protocol based on xmmp for modern times.
xmpp has clients doing voice and video - it has for years. It is p2p and falls over in some nat to nat situations, which is where stun/turn come in on the server. Check out jmp.chat - they built a voip phone service using xmpp clients.
I know they exists, but never got to the usability point we need.m, or even if it did it was too late.
If a sizable chunk of the Reddit community can move to an alpha/beta grade link aggregator platform that can’t handle the load because we believe in the decentralization or the instance’s mission or the overall concept of federation, why is it too late for the community to re-adopt a mature messaging platform that mirrors those ambitions?
Because messaging of that sort needs contacts and Redditors (including me tbf) don’t have friends.
The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I’ve ever seen.
It’s also a great feed reader.
Just wish it had native exchange activesync support, since we’re forced to use exchange accounts at work, and Microsoft no longer allows using M365 accounts directly via IMAP (you need to register applications in Azure that can instead use IMAP)
Stuck using BlueMail instead since it’s the only desktop client that mostly supports EAS. Aside from MailSpring but it had no calendar support despite being promised for years.
Can’t use Outlook since I’m on Linux and running a VM for it is a bit heavy. And I can’t stand outlook web.
There’s a hacky effort to make this easier https://github.com/virtuald/ews-proxy
This connects to REST endpoints that Outlook web interface uses and translates it to EWS… which can be translated to IMAP
That’s quite roundabout. My question is whether or not I’d have the same feature set as I currently do with BlueMail. I’ll do a bit more research, thank you!
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 5•2 years ago
Microsoft Outlook, from what I’ve seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can’t even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?
Outlook
- hides email address => security issue; eases phishing (even beyond not showing whether it’s ensured valid)
- can’t have an inbox filter that moves emails and gives you a normal notification of unread email
- can’t have an inbox filter that is both server side and gives a desktop notification
- can’t save your reply email next to the replied to email in the inbox - but can in the folders
- can’t handle specific column orders (was it category before date then not working? sth like that)
I switched / had to switch at work. It works. I got used to it for the most part. But I’d much prefer using Thunderbird.
Because I’m using both now in both I never intuitively navigate to the delete button. Because the layout is different between the two.
thunderbird is not old looking though
Is it possible to set custom key-bindings yet? I loved Thunderbird ten years ago, and kept using it until the (kinda-janky, community-maintained) keyboard-binding extension broke. I have too many years of muscle-memory invested in my email flow to change that, but otherwise I’d love to come back to Thunderbird.
Emacs. Still the best way to edit any kind of text in any context.
I came to say vim…Is the debate still a thing?
No.
There is no debate because vim is the superior editor, period.
Vim is the greatest tool ever made for manipulating text as text. Emacs is easier to modify (I <3 Lisp) and is better at handling the semantics of the text it’s working with.
Also, Emacs has evil-mode now, so the only reason to still prefer Vim is 1. A strange love of vimscript, or 2. A lack of permissions to install Emacs.
I used to be on the vim side in the debates, but now that I’ve also used Emacs - Porque no los dos?
I’ve been using vim for years. Because I can’t figure out how to exit it
:wq! to save and quit or :q! to just quit
zz will also quit it. Zz when vim is sleepy
Every time I see those videos I think to myself. “Man I’m still working on this shitty first brain and now I have to make a 2nd one?”
Or x, which does the same thing, with the same number of keystrokes. But the ZZ keys are closer together
Spacemacs? What are you five?!?!
Absolutely! I can’t believe when I stumbled across it in 2020 that it was as old as it is. And folks think it’s too old and decrepit to use, it’s inanely powerful.
“inanely powerful” I’m dying
Hmmm nah. I’m not editing. I’ll stand by it.
I found it really funny when the “second brain / knowledge base” apps (like Obidian, Joplin, Logseq) started to explode semi-recently. “Organize your thoughts! Tag everything! Elegance through simplicity! Only use markdown!”
Yeah, I get it, orgmode is a really good idea. No need to re-invent it half a dozen more times to celebrate it’s 20th birthday…
And one of these days, someone will rediscover the magic of having a uniform editing environment for manipulating text in multiple different contexts.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 1•2 years ago
“Elegance through simplicity.” Emacs is not even remotely simple.
I’ve been hoping that some good replacement comes along but they are all lacking significantly. Emacs is the best I’ve found but it’s annoying in many ways that have been fixed by newer alternatives.
Large files, terrible defaults, and elisp come to mind.
IRC is so rad. I learned to touch type by hanging out in IRC channels in the dark on a stolen shell account in 93. I felt like a hacker, really I was a goofball talking about rollerblading on a shell account that no one cared about because they got it for free with their SLIP account.
If I learned nothing from the movie ‘Hackers’, it’s that all hackers need to know how to rollerblade. It’s like, if you don’t know how to rollerblade, are you really a hacker?
If you can’t rollerblade to a public phone to use your bluebox so you can call your granny for free, are you really a phreaker?
core memory unlocked.
except replace blue with beige and granny with a running a pirate BBS
How do you use a beige box on a payphone? Wouldn’t people get curious if you start trying to expose wires and connect alligator clips?
Extra memory unlocked: WWIV BBS software
HOLY SHIT, it’s still being developed
^°§√|~[%$&#.
NO CARRIER
I mean, I would use a redbox myself, but diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.
u c4nt b3 l33t w1th0ut fru1tb00t5 0n yr f33t
USENET. Replacements aren’t distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don’t have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.
You know any good guides about how to get started with Usenet?
Because clients can present very different interfaces, it’s difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn’t carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.
As for which client, I use Pan, but that’s Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven’t a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.
Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.
90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.
If you’re interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I’m not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).
Oof, that’s rough. (Paragraphs 3-4, I mean.) Thanks, I appreciate the info. At the very least, it’ll be a good starting-off point. :)
The other thing I would advise is reading RFC 1855: Netiquette, section 3.0 (One-to-many communication) and 3.1.3 (NetNews guidelines), as anyone still hanging out in the discussion groups is likely to be an ancient being like me who gets hung up on things like quoting protocol.
anyone still hanging out in the discussion groups is likely to be an ancient being like me
Wait, that makes it sound like Usenet is dying… Is it really that empty? :(
The parts of it where I used to hang out are. I stay subscribed to a few discussion groups, mostly for the sake of nostalgia. Of those, rec.arts.anime.misc is the busiest, with maybe a half-dozen on-topic posts a month (I’m ignoring the rash of recent warez posts). ~25 years ago, it got more than a hundred posts a day. Another one up in the alt hierarchy hasn’t had any legitimate posts in more than a decade, as far as I can recall, although it was always much lighter-traffic.
Maybe some of the other hierarchies, like comp.* or talk.*, are doing better, but the place really is a shadow of its former self. I think part of the problem is that many ISPs no longer have servers, so you have to either find one of the few remaining free servers or buy service from somewhere like Giganews to get on.
Usenet use to be great. Predated forums and Reddit. Frankly the threadiverse is just now going a bit back to that concept.
I miss the days when usenet was a standard part of most ISPs included offerings.
Hopefully the fediverse can get wnought traction to grow some vibrant communities like we used to enjoy in heyday of the old newsgroups.
CompuServe was pretty good too but very expensive. So not somethimg I care to go back to.
