I’m not asking about how it is used for warez, since that is what it mostly hosting at this point… Nor am I asking why anyone should or should not start a community on USENET (many reasons why you wouldn’t/couldn’t).
Instead, I am asking why someone would only decide to engage with the textual, traditional, conversational aspects of USENET over modern tools like lemmy?
I could name a few I suppose:
- Relative anonymity
- Access to a large amount of history
- Nostalgia
- Communication with those who still frequent newsgroups
I don’t know how many more there are but I would like to hear your guys’ opinions in regards to those listed above and any others I may have missed.
Usenets great, pure text, tons of topics, its great. Same with Fidonet etc. Only downside is ISPs pushed it out to make access harder now.
Holy shit fidonet still exists?
Sure does
How do I access it?
Any major BBS should have a connection to it still.
I never used it but I heard it was rather similar to USENET
It was mirrored by independent BBS systems forming a dial up web independent of the internet. It was the fediverse of the 90s.
I was so bummed when ISPs started ditching their own Usenet servers and a lot of the remaining ones were paid. Not to mention access to alt.bin.*
I kinda wish the binary newsgroups stayed exclusively in the paid ones, but alas that wasn’t how it played out