A thought prompted by seeing instances growing and struggling to have enough resources. Then and now, people in groups trying to communicate something. Hardware became incredibly faster over decades, storage became incredibly more huge, and software bloat kept pace?
One difference is there’s no organizational hierarchy like there is on Usenet.
Another difference is that you can have fifteen different subs with the same name, confusing everyone, diluting contribution, and spurring multiple reposts of the same content in the “all” feed.
Other than that, it’s similar.
About the second point, it would be neat if “subs” could federate somehow.
One challenge at a time, cuz!
I’m sure it’s in the roadmap, but the devs have all kinds of moderation headaches and other things that are far more important to ‘brew up’ first.
They can and do. Every sub has a unique name.
The complaint is that there isn’t a single entity who gets to decide which sub is the authoritative sub for a topic. Which is a feature, not a bug.
Communities will coalesce around certain subs that work, and they will rise up over the alternatives. We’re just in ego-land-grab mode right now.
Usenet plus voting, reputation, moderation by default, and a different content propagation model. Usenet died out for a variety of reasons, but unmitigated spam didn’t help. I’m hopeful lemmy with “ownership” of a community built in will foster more quality engagement.
The biggest hurdle I see is identity, asking people to create an account is lots of friction. Using existing identity providers (google, apple, microsoft, github, stackoverflow) would reduce the friction and let more people participate.
identity providers (google, apple, microsoft, github, stackoverflow)
I’d always supposed that was about megacorporations tracking us.
It can be done optionally, right? I fully agree that creating an account, which (ironically) cannot be federated using one of the big IDPs, creates unnecessary friction.
Normies are used to be able to login via one of these.
To be honest, when I see what happens to reddit with the normies left behind, I see the lack of authentication via a big brother company as a pro.
It is tracking, sure, but there is a tradeoff. Some people might not care that github knows they have a lemmy account, and for those people they don’t have to manage yet another login, so they are more likely to participate.
Heck Lemmy could build in federation identity into lemmy, so it doesn’t matter your on lemmy instance X, you can still bring your identity from instance Y and not have to post from your home instance.
The more options the better.
I’m hopeful lemmy with “ownership” of a community built in will foster more quality engagement.
But this ownership can easily break every owner’s neck, because he also owns any illegal content that was created by others. Voluntary mods are not sufficient to mitigate this risk in the long run.
What I liked about Reddit was that it offered the kind of threaded conversations that Usenet used to.
What I still like about Mastodon is that federation lets you find the community that is right for you, the way Usenet used to.
If Lemmy can offer both then as far as I’m concerned it will be the best resurrection of Usenet that I could hope for.
Now we just need IRC to go with it.
Matrix.
Usenet is still there. IMO, we should be trying to funnel the most techy users among us over there and maybe it could be resurrected for discussion once again. Right now it is more or less users talking to themselves.
I had the feeling Usenet today is like lobste.rs and you need to know someone to participate, and I never know anyone. (I remember Usenet from back in the day, but was just a lurker.)
Know someone to get on or know someone to talk back and forth with? I mean, you could use google groups interface which is awful but still sort of an on ramp to it (and free). Plenty of usenet services out there though. you could pay a buck or two to blocknews.net for a few gigs and now you have “premium” access. discussion groups will take a long time to eat up 5 gigs. the real problem is sorting through to find the active groups not to mention finding decent nntp newsreader software for your platform. actually someone just posted a few days back in alt.fan.usenet some decently active discussion groups. got to start somewhere i suppose.
alt.culture.usenet: alt.fan.usenet: alt.obituaries: alt.privacy: alt.tv.simpsons: ba.broadcast: comp.ai: comp.arch: comp.compilers: comp.dcom.telecom: comp.infosystems.gemini: comp.infosystems.gopher: comp.lang.c++: comp.lang.c: comp.lang.forth: comp.lang.misc: comp.lang.python.announce: comp.lang.python: comp.lang.raspberry-pi: comp.lang.tcl: comp.misc: comp.mobile.android: comp.mobile.misc: comp.os.cpm: comp.os.linux.announce: comp.os.linux.misc: comp.risks: comp.sys.apple2: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action: comp.text.tex: comp.unix.shell: gnu.emacs.help: misc.legal.moderated: misc.taxes.moderated: news.admin.moderation: news.announce.important: news.announce.newgroups: news.groups.proposals: news.groups: news.software.readers: rec.arts.drwho: rec.arts.movies.current-films: rec.arts.sf.tv: rec.arts.sf.written: rec.autos.sport.f1: rec.aviation.soaring: rec.bicycles.tech: rec.food.cooking: rec.games.backgammon: rec.music.beatles: rec.music.classical.recordings: rec.radio.amateur.antenna: rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors: rec.radio.amateur.equipment: rec.radio.amateur.homebrew: rec.radio.amateur.misc: rec.radio.amateur.moderated: rec.radio.amateur.policy: rec.radio.amateur.space: rec.radio.info: rec.radio.shortwave: rec.sport.rowing: rec.woodworking: sci.astro: sci.electronics.design: sci.electronics.repair: sci.logic: sci.physics.relativity: sci.physics.research: talk.origins: uk.comp.sys.mac: uk.radio.amateur.moderated: uk.rec.sheds: uk.sci.weather:Know someone to get on or know someone to talk back and forth with?
Haven’t paid close attention, and just knew that when I see mention of Usenet, there’s all talk about invites nowadays.
Usenet is mainly used for pirating these days. The invites are probably referring to indexers which are sites that post nzb files that tell your Usenet client which posts to download for a certain movie/tv show/ etc.
Ah. That must be right.
My recollection is that access to Usenet requires a paid feed. Anyone can spin up a Lemmy server if they are willing to deal with the administrative hassle.
well, you can use google groups web interface but that sucks. there is also the eternal september free text access. for premium access blocknews has 5 gigs for 2 bucks which will last forever if you are just reading text groups. 2 bucks (or the free options) are a lot less than what the server would cost to run a lemmy instance.
Yes, but google is paying for the newsfeed. You don’t have to pay to access the fediverse.
