Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:12:06 -0400 From: grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: OT: The future of USENET? Message-ID: <CAD2Ti2-5GDjpOoue1gCb5ZJryT9b%2B1kEGkaehMkTk0CECxrr3w@mail.gmail.com>
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Usenet was great. 'Was' because it really isn't there anymore. Servers used to be widespread, you could use your ISP, your school, your work, and failing that plenty of free ones even if for the asking, even some public/open ones. Now there are very few, if any, free servers and likely none are public/open for obvious reasons. Post 2000 Web 2.0 and those eyeballs destroyed usenet. They are the idiot mass and they demanded to only see the world through their browser window. And when usenet died off, so did the long running text only archive servers, taking decades of human knowledge with them. Vanished. Just the same as web forums do when they vanish. Google's 'group' archive doesn't count, they're a corporation, they wrapped it in web 2.0, they don't care, it will die. The bandwidth cost, piracy and porn was just as damning as web 2.0. The former caused the formal ISP/school/work support to die. The latter stole the eyeballs. Back then you had to have brains to be on the net, now everyone is web 2.0, and they're satisfied with ridiculous web forums. Any brains today are all but forced to use them because the population is so slim anywhere else. Usenet has suffered its generational penalty. Usenet is still viable long term as a free/donation service, as is irc, if operators do not carry the binary groups. Its new hope lies with the opensource, hackerspace, anonymous, and related communities of all sorts. As a giant distributed mailing list, it's an awesome service that these communities really should look at more closely. Its future is up to you... will you run a server and list it as a communication method (even primary) for your project, or not? Will you donate a server to the public, or not? FreeBSD related... it would be really nice if someone would shim the FreeBSD forum to cause every post to be copied out to a set of FreeBSD mailing lists. So the efficient/interested among us could at least read, search and archive them without being forced to waste time with the web interface.
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