I also prefer the text based nature of USENET, it was simpler and honestly easier to create whole fleshed out ideas. Your article had a nice stage and a spotlight all to its own in each message pane, meanwhile the modern forums have you view the text within surrounding comments or text. I just think it makes it less intimate than it was before. Though, easier to scroll through

I would say that I liked the simpler technology stack that it used to communicate, even working over high-latency high-throughput transfer links (i.e. Tape drives over 747s back in the day). Though that is specifically UUCP related rather than USENET as a whole.

Wide range of powerful, mature clients with extensive filtering functionality, offline reading support.

Sadly this isn’t really the case anymore. All the to previously used clients (other than command line) for most major platforms have been dead for over a decade now due to the drop in usage of USENET during the 2000s. With that as well there never were any actual mobile clients that were developed (as a side note).

Better client-side accessibility. I mean, you can be blind and use a screenreader or something on Usenet. Going to be a lot less ideal on the Threadiverse.

I think this has a lot to deal with just the tech stack required to run the modern Threadiverse. I honestly liked the simple and low-level aspects of USENET vs HTTP based alternatives. USENET was defined by objectively shorter standards than what current HTTP and Web technologies define. It also meant a larger selection of clients (and the possibility to create your own) due to the greater simplicity of standards required for it to function.

Since it was also was built as function over form vs the Web’s reciprocal approach it makes implementations like screen readers much more difficult unless the developers specifically include that into their Threadiverse software

Comment editors are probably better than the in-browser textarea editors or clients with limited text-editors that I’ve seen (though the Threadiverse has Markdown as a standard, which I think is generally preferable).

Markdown is nice I just find it hard to read sometimes due to it kinda being like a web page within a web page. Or better put it’s more like if you took a physical scroll of simple comments (no headers, no nothing, just text) and then pasted (physically) a fully formatted document as if it were just another comment ignoring any kind of page start or end. It just feels odd to look at. I hope that all made sense.

Though I haven’t been browsing Usenet in some time, and maybe they have MIME-encoded Markdown or HTML or something as a common thing now.

There is the option to include HTML in messages but I think that is generally considered bad form just due to the nature of embedding images into articles rather than having them as some kind of message attachment is not really in the spirit of the minimal nature of USENET.

More-standardized support for posting embedded binaries.

Maybe uuencode and base32/64 as yEnc wasn’t really a proper standard and more so defacto which lead to some clients that decided to not implement it at all (MS, Mozilla; along with other mail client news readers)

Commercial service is available. It’s great that people donate their time and funds to make Threadiverse servers run, but there’s something to be said for the resources available from commercial service. There’s nothing stopping someone from running a commercial Threadiverse instance, but AFAIK, nobody presently is doing so.

The only real reason why the commercial service because a real big thing for USENET and pretty much the exclusive way to access it was because of the large amount of binary newsgroups, which in my opinion really destroyed USENET since it cause mass desertion of the system, including the horrible amount of spam.

As for a threadiverse instance it probably is best that it remain non-commercialized, or if it were to become so it wouldn’t have as much an impact because the risk of storing gigantic binaries with little moderation is minimized.

Newsgroups are more discoverable than are communities on the Threadiverse — you really need to use the https://lemmyverse.net/ index to find any communities out there, as otherwise you’ll only see it once the exact name “!community@instancename” has been searched for on your local instance. Usenet (mostly) propagated newsgroups everywhere.

This is one of my biggest gripes I have with lemmy and the rest of the threadiverse. For me to discover new communities to subscribe to on a separate federated instance I have to navigate directly to said instance via the url bar of my browser and search them manually rather than be able to search for them from my instance. If they had some kind of community distribution function then it would be much simpler to find niche communities.

If this point isn’t addressed eventually it might end up actually inadvertently contributing to the centralization of communities where everyone peers to lemmy.world for example just to get all the communities rather than seeing existing communities on other instances.

Probably a larger userbase, though I haven’t dug up current numbers. Certainly a different group and set of interests.

Its mostly graybeards and a lot of binary uploads. There are still quite a few active newsgroups though, you just have to look through the endless onslaught of past uploads in supposedly ‘text only’ newsgroups that have been overrun by binaries.

Really the only good provider that you can use to get the classic experience is eternal September (which is free btw)

I would bet that Usenet servers can scale up to more load than can Threadiverse servers.

This could be argued by saying that there wouldn’t be a need to use web tech to service all the requests sure, but I honestly don’t think that the scalability would be much different. Though, I am not in a position to provide actually insightful commentary on this specific subject.

@tal usenet has gotten a bit better now that Google switched off the access from Groups. But it’s kinda dead by now

What did you pay for her?

sadly, yes

Yep

the lack of JS is one of my fave features about it. I don’t have to really worry about running remotely provided code when I just want to read a discussion.

Also, I do agree. Usually the conversations are rather insightful, though thats probably just the people

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.

Holy shit fidonet still exists?

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.*

They already said not warez though

The relative anonymity that I refer to is the lack of validation of posting profiles. This isn’t on a level of layer 1, 2 or 3 but on how providers don’t need any information linked to an ID or at times even emails (for those servers that don’t require authentication for posting) You could define any email, name and user agent in the header fields as a posting profile and it would just accept it.

However, this particular aspect that in my eyes, as a whole, was a good thing regarding the system it did provide a strong foundation for the systemic spam problem that was seen across the board in all newsgroups. Accountability could not be maintained and the only thing to stop bad posts from getting through was quickly overwhelmed moderators.

So no, this isn’t the same level of anonymity that we would expect from modern solutions but there also wasn’t the same guardrails and requirements of identity that has been imposed upon the public like with modern accounts requiring email addresses and phone numbers.

There was a time where accounts didn’t require an email. Side note, this is precisely why I like XMPP as a concept. Though I have found little use for it due to the network effect.

They rely on safe harbor provisions within the dmca. Its like how your isp can’t be sued for you downloading warez, usenet providers just provide access to the network and look the other way at what goes over it.

It’s kind of federated. You can purchase access through providers and use proxy/vpn.

Most ISPs no longer host or provide access.

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.

No options other than web based applications (which pretty much none exist beyond paywalls)

just dial 911 and tell the operator you love them.

No I do not, The only reason to really pay for it is to be able to download warez or use specialized newsreaders that integrate with indexers and the like. Just not my speed.

You would use it for the same reasons that you use lemmy. Just back in the late 80s until the early 00s; and with a lot more spam…