The reports of its death are greatly exaggerated

I took a look arround and I found the same old hierarchy of big-8, company-sponsored and local communities. A precious few news groups are still inhabited by humans; some are inhabited by spam bots; most are plain dead. This is of course subjective to where I looked at and the depth of my research.

There is some meaningful discussion in the groups that are still alive. There are very few groups on modern topics (e.g., there is a Raspberry Pi group but none for Toki Pona).

My question to you is: is there any new hierarchy that is vibrant, where groups on topics similar to what we see on Reddit or here are created, where groups on "historical" topics are pruned if not useful anymore?

Posted in: s/Usenet

🦋 karel

Jan 28 · 4 months ago · 👍 aRubes, dragfyre · 😄 1

4 Comments ↓

🚀 stack · Jan 28 at 18:05:

Around Y2K the newsgroups had a lot of binaries, music and movies. It was often the only place to find obscure titles. Over the years the binary groups were overrun with huge encrypted posts, containing god knows what. The industry fought back by first removing chunks of files making it impossible to assemble a movie or an album, and later, by chaffing the newsgroups with large fake posts containing garbage with attractive titles. At the time it would take hours to download a set only to find out it contains nothing or a passworded zip file...

🦋 karel [OP] · Jan 28 at 18:06:

ERRATA: I use a news server that only carries text messages; thus alt.binaries and such are out of the scope of this question.

Follow-up question: where are the periodically posted FAQs ?! These used to be a thing in Usenet back then.

🚀 ElectricalDance · Jan 28 at 20:57:

Well, google announced they will stop supporting usenet, but who cares, google does not support Gemini and we are thriving, and google likes to destroy projects even more popular ones.

💎 istvan · Jan 29 at 16:04:

Google getting out of Usenet might actually fix Usenet since it fell apart when Google tried to hijack and twist it into its own product.