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.
Usenet gave me my first girlfriend.
What did you pay for her?
Is USENET used for piracy mostly?
Yep
In line with nostalgia, some kind of tourism. People dress up as vikings and practice with axes, even though they don’t remember the good ol’ days of raiding monasteries.
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.
Sailing the high seas.
They already said not warez though
How can one access Usenet on an iPhone ?
Text is faster than a web browser. No JS. High quality conversations.
This may it sound like a silly question but what kind of high quality conversations? It’s been so long since I’ve used USENET. I’m not even sure how you connect with conversations on there.
I remember talking to real experts in programming and C++. Hacker News used to be like that, but they became stupid with AI.
Relative anonymity
I don’t know how Usenet works, but how is it anonymous? If it has central servers, police can just ask them for your IP address. If it’s peer to peer, police or others can just participate and log your IP address.
I mean that is from the perspective of using it for piracy. Or what exactly do you mean by anonymity?
It’s kind of federated. You can purchase access through providers and use proxy/vpn.
Most ISPs no longer host or provide access.
Purchasing and anonymous don’t really go together.
Prepaid visa bought with cash. Next question?
Although options there seem to be declining as well, at least where I live.
Usenet is a bit like the fediverse, it has tons of different servers that all talk to each other, and the admins of each server decide which groups it carries. So it you use a server outside the jurisdiction of the police you’re afraid of you’re somewhat anonymous.
But don’t you pay for its use, like providers and indexers? Seems archaic, and I’ve never had enough good reasons to use it so I’m curious what others say. If I did, I was a teenager and probably didn’t understand what I was using anyway.
Same reason people use the tildeverse its good and pure.
