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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet:
Long before Facebook existed, or even before the Internet, there was
Usenet. Usenet was the first social network. Now, with Google Groups
abandoning Usenet, this oldest of all social networks is doomed to
disappear. Some might say it's well past time. As Google declared, "Over
the last several years, legitimate activity in text-based Usenet groups
has declined significantly because users have moved to more modern
technologies and formats such as social media and web-based forums. Much
of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text)
file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam."
True, these days, Usenet's content is almost entirely spam, but in its
day, Usenet was everything that Twitter and Reddit would become and more.

In 1979, Duke University computer science graduate students Tom Truscott
and Jim Ellis conceived of a network of shared messages under various
topics. These messages, also known as articles or posts, were submitted
to topic categories, which became known as newsgroups. Within those
groups, messages were bound together in threads and sub-threads. [...]
In 1980, Truscott and Ellis, using the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol
(UUCP), hooked up with the University of North Carolina to form the
first Usenet nodes. From there, it would rapidly spread over the
pre-Internet ARPANet and other early networks. These messages would be
stored and retrieved from news servers. These would "peer" to each other
so that messages to a newsgroup would be shared from server to server
and to user to user so that within hours, your messages would reach the
entire networked world. Usenet would evolve its own network protocol,
Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to speed the transfer of these
messages. Today, the social network Mastodon uses a similar approach
with the ActivityPub protocol, while other social networks, such as
Threads, are exploring using ActivityPub to connect with Mastodon and
the other social networks that support ActivityPub. As the saying goes, everything old is new again.

[...] Usenet was never an organized social network. Each server owner
could -- and did -- set its own rules. Mind you, there was some
organization to begin with. The first 'mainstream' Usenet groups, comp,
misc, news, rec, soc, and sci hierarchies, were widely accepted and disseminated until 1987. Then, faced with a flood of new groups, a new
naming plan emerged in what was called the Great Renaming. This led to a
lot of disputes and the creation of the talk hierarchy. This and the
first six became known as the Big Seven. Then the alt groups emerged as
a free speech protest. Afterward, fewer Usenet sites made it possible to
access all the newsgroups. Instead, maintainers and users would have to
decide which one they'd support. Over the years, Usenet began to decline
as discussions were replaced both by spam and flame wars. Group
discussions were also overwhelmed by flame wars.
"If, going forward, you want to keep an eye on Usenet -- things could
change, miracles can happen -- you'll need to get an account from a
Usenet provider," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "I favor
Eternal September, which offers free access to the discussion Usenet
groups; NewsHosting, $9.99 a month with access to all the Usenet groups; EasyNews, $9.98 a month with fast downloads, and a good search engine;
and Eweka, 9.50 Euros a month and EU only servers."

"You'll also need a Usenet client. One popular free one is Mozilla's Thunderbird E-Mail client, which doubles as a Usenet client. EasyNews
also offers a client as part of its service. If you're all about
downloading files, check out SABnzbd."
--
@RabidPedagog

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* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)