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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Free and Open Source Software
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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.
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.
Know any good free servers? Assuming my ISP does not have one of its own.