- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
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i feel like the newsgroups could also be pegged as an early distributed/mass-audience environment similar to what we see today… multiple nodes sharing sometimes identical loads of content
i miss tagline management… bluewave
e. ALso! the star trek nonsense was strong with alt.wesly.crusher.die.die.die!
We’ve got some strong Star Trek nonsense brewing in [email protected]
Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.
ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…
The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.
If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.
unmoderated
Fun fact: that’s not strictly true.
You could have moderated groups, where a moderator/group of moderators would get sent every post via email, and they’d only be posted into the group if approved.
The vast, vast, vast majority of groups were not moderated, but that’s not to say you couldn’t do so.
Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.
We all knew it was possible
I wouldn’t bet on that, which is why I mentioned moderated groups at all. As you said, they’re rare and even if you used usenet 20 or 25 or 30 years ago, the odds that you’d have ever seen one was shockingly low.
So even ex-usenet users might not have a clue that there was a method for doing that (let alone any of the people who aren’t that old), which is why I brought it up.
Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.
I don’t think they mean unmoderated as in can’t be moderated but just that they weren’t moderated.
ISP around me had policies like “we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees”
usenet was Lemmy without the web UI
ach ja!
pegged
Haha
Yeah and then google+microsoft rolled in and killed the decentralized nature of email with gmail and outlook.
Only sign left of the good ol days is merged accounts with @ old domain names and the few that self host.
It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.
Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.
You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.
Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.
Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square
Sure, they might’ve cornered the market fair and square, but they’re certainly doing anticompetitive things in keeping it cornered.
Just try setting up a mail server not connected to any of the big corpos (Google, MS, Cloudflare or their clients with more niche marketing) and see who will actually recieve your mails. You most likely won’t land into the Spam folder either.
