John W Kennedy <john.w.kennedy@gmail.com> writes:
On 6/30/18 12:15 PM, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
John W Kennedy <john.w.kennedy@gmail.com> writes:
[…]
USENET is dead.
That doesn’t seem entirely true. For example, looking through Aioe
reveals the following groups.
[…]
Given that retention there is about four months (or so) for most of
the groups, it looks like there’re a number of groups that get
around a hundred posts a day.
It does not, of course, guarantee that a specific individual will
find anything of value to him- or herself among these groups.
But, realistically speaking, for celebrities to communicate with
ordinary people, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are today’s
world, and, of those three, Twitter is, on the whole, the most
satisfactory.
Personally, any communication medium that is decentralized and has
an open protocol is fine with me. Bonus points for having a working
Emacs-based user agent (or at least one accessible via tty.)
AFAICT, none of the above fits these criteria.
Unfortunately, USENET is vulnerable to months-long spam-bomb attacks,
to political shutdowns based on allegations (true or not) of kiddie
porn, and to increased desertion by ISPs.
And how’s that different to any other public service, especially
one operated mainly by volunteers?
For instance, many public wikis, including those run by
Wikimedia Foundation, get a fair share of spam (and other kinds
of abuse), too. It takes considerable manpower of unpaid
volunteers to mitigate that. (I know as I have been part of that.)
That approach could made to work for Usenet, too; the technical
part is already here (cf. news:news.lists.filters, for instance.)
As for the shutdowns, there was recently an attempt to block
Telegram in Russia due to allegations of it being used by
terrorists.
Finally, ISPs are irrelevant. ISPs have increasingly abandoned
email, without much ill effects, and you don’t really expect ISP
to run its own search engine or host a copy of Wikipedia, right?
That is, there’s simply no way an ISP can meaningfully compete
with a free email service, a free search engine, a free
encyclopedia, – or a free Usenet server, like Aioe or E-S.
Of the thirty-odd USENET groups I’ve been following since the early
90s, whether technical, academic, or pop-culture, most have an
average of less than one posting per day, and almost never rise to as
many as ten unless there’s a spam attack.
Like I said, there’s no guarantee that there would be an active
group that matches a specific interest of a given individual.
Some obscure corners may still be alive,
I’m somewhat puzzled as to how you define ‘obscure’?
but most people who weren’t online 10 years ago don’t even know that USENET exists, or how to use it, except via Google Groups.
Well, I was introduced to WWW in 1998 (I think), and to Internet
at large (including Usenet) the next year, so I didn’t witness
that myself, yet I don’t think that apart from a few years
starting with September 1993 and ending with WWW gaining
prominence, Usenet was all that popular among the general public
(IOW, those lacking technical background) to begin with.
--
FSF associate member #7257 np. To Catch a Falling Star — Forest Rain
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