I’m not asking about how it is used for warez, since that is what it mostly hosting at this point… Nor am I asking why anyone should or should not start a community on USENET (many reasons why you wouldn’t/couldn’t).
Instead, I am asking why someone would only decide to engage with the textual, traditional, conversational aspects of USENET over modern tools like lemmy?
I could name a few I suppose:
- Relative anonymity
- Access to a large amount of history
- Nostalgia
- Communication with those who still frequent newsgroups
I don’t know how many more there are but I would like to hear your guys’ opinions in regards to those listed above and any others I may have missed.
Usenet is more or less dead. From thousands of servers to just a couple of free real Usenet servers and 60 or so corporate ones.
Its nice that there are a couple of free text only ones left, but the days of all universities and ISPs and anyone else sharing are long gone.
Http is becoming a dystopian wasteland
Back when usenet was the main subculture channel every ISP had a usenet server and many would mirror parts of the binaries trees of requested. Some would compete by offering more of the entire usenet feed
Everyone on the internet used it.
Now it’s a desert. You can dig for old opinions, old software. There’s no community outside the copyright infringement community.
Text is faster than a web browser. No JS. High quality conversations.
This may it sound like a silly question but what kind of high quality conversations? It’s been so long since I’ve used USENET. I’m not even sure how you connect with conversations on there.
Usenets great, pure text, tons of topics, its great. Same with Fidonet etc. Only downside is ISPs pushed it out to make access harder now.
I like the terminal but I like decentralization more.
Where does that put you in terms of your relationship with USENET?
I don’t use it. I have not used the terminal much except for specific admin type commands and running scripts since the teens started. I really was trying to look for terminal things that could funtion like a gui. in particular email. I wanted the calendar function. I finally gave up and accepted gui as the main interface.
Relative anonymity
I don’t know how Usenet works, but how is it anonymous? If it has central servers, police can just ask them for your IP address. If it’s peer to peer, police or others can just participate and log your IP address.
I mean that is from the perspective of using it for piracy. Or what exactly do you mean by anonymity?