So I’ve finally been doing my little reddit/twitter migration against my better judgement (my better judgement would say to take the opportunity to get off the internet but who listens to that loser). I’m finding all these platforms interesting, I particularly like how kbin combines both formats and links up to Mastodon, that’s quite an idea.
Having said that all this nonsense made me nostalgic for Usenet all over again. I had some very enjoyable years on there and quite a lot of what I liked about Reddit was actually that it felt like the closest thing the web had to Usenet. (You’d think Google Groups was the closest thing but for some reason it wasn’t. There is something I just loved about a newsreader’s interface that Google Groups didn’t replicate and it was just annoying).
It actually made me go check some old newsgroups out, and, well, that’s the eternal problem Usenet isn’t it - it being 99% dead as a parrot.
Is anybody still on Usenet, and if so what newsgroups do you follow? For that matter, what newsgroups are you aware of as still having some activity? Is anybody interested in getting (back) on it, and if so on where? Is Google Groups still in 2023 the best the web has to offer in terms of accessing it easily?
Ah yes, Usenet was the original Fediverse. Kind of. It was more of a distributed peer-to-peer system than the current day ActivityPub. I loved it back when it was mainly discussion and the .binaries groups were an awkward sideshow. Reddit filled that niche in terms of its actual function, but I always knew the underlying centralized structure of Reddit would someday be its downfall.
The sad thing is that back when it first began Reddit was actually planning on being federated too. They released their server as open source and had plans to make it able to interact with other Reddit servers. Never came to fruition.
They even paid someone to design a semi-monetary points system and then scrapped it…