The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to be
The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to be
With Google dropping support for the oldest of social networks, Usenet is now left without another major entry gate.
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usenet and irc were 'the fediverse' before it became trendy.
So much this! I am old, I guess, but I was on Usenet for years before the web was even invented. When I became aware of the fediverse, I got serious Usenet vibes. A decentralized model, several servers, you access one and get what it sends you, but it syncs with all other servers. You‘re getting everything in the entire Usenet and what you post gets everywhere too… we’ve come full circle, I think, even if we now use ActivePub instead of NNTP… a shame people nowadays know of it as “that piracy thing” instead of what it once was (and was designed to be).
Preach! My first experience with Usenet was rexx scripts on a mainframe using tn3270. Same with all of the ftp sites. Remember fingering id software?
Also, you can post to nntp via email.
Yah, I can’t imagine finger being widely deployed nowadays, the huge security and privacy hole it would be!
As for nntp and email… I also remember using email relay proxies for FTP way back when! FTP access to some places was spotty at best, so I sent a GET request to an email server that would get the file, UUENCODE it, and send it multipart by email. Not that files were big back then, but not was it possible to attach more than a few hundred KBs at once, if that.
In fact, I just remembered a funny story from when I was using the Usenet. I used a client that ran on our VAX/VMS mainframe. While browsing the newsgroups, I would get a figure for the transfer rate at the bottom of the screen. It was usually in tens of bytes per second, sometimes a few hundred. Often it stalled, etc. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I see it is showing “1”. My immediate thought as the most plausible interpretation: “damn, one byte per second. this is especially slow today!” And then I noticed the units: one KILOBYTE per second. it was the first time I had ever seen such a fast transfer rate!
A few years later, mid 90s I was trying to download a video that accompanied a conference paper. It was 6MB in size if memory serves. It took me from Friday afternoon to Sunday to manage it. Not only was it slow, but it kept interrupting and I had to start over numerous times. But I did manage in the end, and walked away with it split into a few floppy disks 🙂.
We’ve certainly come a long way since!
I remember stitching multipart uuencoded files together by hand, lol. Then when OS/2 2.0 came out, IBM fully embraced the Internet of the time and had the best Usenet client that would gasp do all of that automatically and display the image or save the binary file you were after. WebEx was also the best web browser until Netscape took over.
you can post to nntp via email.
There are web<->nntp gateways too; and not just the ggroups one!
Nntp by uucp was life-changing.
Back in the day I'd use UUCP over dial up to the local university to get email and my chosen usenet groups. Ah, the nostalgia of coming home to find my Amiga's floppy had run out of room...
IRC wasn't federated though, but you could indeed connect to multiple servers with the same client.
I mean
There were networks such as: EFnet Undernet Quakenet DALnet
different servers in different regions did network together.
There was a different word for 'defederation' back then: net split https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit
And it was usually from a networking issue.
I'm still salty that an IRCOP from a (now defunct) Canadian server used a net split as an attack: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_takeover
to steal a # channel from my friends and make it private long enough to sort out the bot auto bans. We appealed, but because they were an IRCOP, the other IRCOPs from the federated servers were just like, "whatever, pound sand users, go run a server if you want to control stuff like us."
Anyway, IRC was a connection of various servers run by various people/corporations/universities etc.
Oh true, I forgot about that. I remember Freenode running multiple servers and them always netsplitting. Good times :)
All of the protocols that have been ratified are federated. That was kind of the big thing of the internet. HTTP, SMTP (email), FTP, etc. All federated.
When people talk about defederating threads, I’m always curious why they think Net Neutrality is a bad idea, or if they’d appreciate if their email providers didn’t allow emails to Gmail because they don’t like big corporations…
Neutrality is a bad idea, or if they’d appreciate if >their email providers didn’t allow emails to Gmail >because they don’t like big corporations…
email servers and domains are blocked constantly and have been since the 90's when they are pushing spam, malware,etc.
Spam filters isn’t the same as defederating. As far as I know outside of cert issues (like DKIM to prevent spoofing) nobody would prevent you from sending an email to any domain that uses SMTP. And if you allowlist emails from that domain you’ll receive it.
This is not the same as Gmail saying “we won’t allow emails to and from proton” or vice versa.
But MANY email services block entire domains. Not "to" I'll give you but from.
As far as I know no email services (at least the big ones) do that. They will mark some domains as spam by default but if you allow them (e.g. adding the email to your contacts) you will get them in your inbox, penis pills and all.
I’d rather be able to do that for Mastodon (allow me to follow some people but mark the rest as whatever-the-equivalent-of-spam is).