While text based messages on usenet may be dieing, the file sharing is still quite popular. My radar and sonar still pick up plenty of signals.
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usenet and irc were ‘the fediverse’ before it became trendy.
So much this! I am old, I guess, but I was on Usenet for years before the web was even invented. When I became aware of the fediverse, I got serious Usenet vibes. A decentralized model, several servers, you access one and get what it sends you, but it syncs with all other servers. You‘re getting everything in the entire Usenet and what you post gets everywhere too… we’ve come full circle, I think, even if we now use ActivePub instead of NNTP… a shame people nowadays know of it as “that piracy thing” instead of what it once was (and was designed to be).
Well the issue with Usenet is the following:
- Usenet is quite old
- Usenet is not very well known.
- Usenet has many barriers to entry.
- Usenet groups have garnered an exclusionary reputation.
- Other easier options have existed for a long time for basic social media interaction.
Usenet also largely became a venue for bootlegging and porn – and due to the nature of the protocol, companies hosting Usenet services didn’t want to have to store all of that shit. After about 1995, you didn’t go there for discussion anymore. Eternal September messed it up. Lemmy is fortunate that you can’t really use it for file sharing, a few images notwithstanding, or the same thing would happen.
It should be emphasized, the above list is accurate for Social Interaction as the discussions and text have indeed waned. It does mention that at the end, but still.
For media sharing specifically, many of those above items are either trivial OR are actually what helps it thrive. Somehow, 30 years later, we’re still under the radar and maxing out connection speeds without having to VPN, seed, share or dodge ISP rules and DMCA requests.
I don’t think irc and usenet is dead. It’s still used a lot for piracy.
I think it comes to down to the definition of “dead”. Both are certainly dead for the reasons they were created.
I’m old, but does anyone remember alt.pave.the.earth? And the spinoff alt.chrome.the.moon?
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