Hello, sorry for butting in!
Helm <
nospam@please.inavlid> writes:
I know alot of young and old people who know about Usenet and are
tired of big tech censorship and algorthmitic manipulation of content
feeds
This. I think USENET can still carve a specific niche for people who
want to have a way to disseminate information in a distributed way without the content curation algorithms that these social media platforms all do now.
While there is significant spam in USENET, I think it's a decent trade
off considering the freedoms that you can get with the protocol.
Mailng lists and Usenet Newsgroups are the future. Facebook, reddit,
and even 4chan recently, are all censoring posts. Mailing groups (and
some Usenet newsgroups) have moderation, but once a post is approved
it comes to the top of the post - the user can decide what they do and
don't want to see with a killfile. Here there is no subtle
manipulation. Even web forums are better than Reddit/Facebook. Usenet
also shines because it can be accessed without a web browser - a news
client or any mail client linked to a news2mail gateway can access
Usenet. In certain African and European countries where people have to
pay for each megabyte/gigabyte they use, Usenet is perfect because
there is no extra html bloat with the postings whatsover. It is also decentralized, so posts are impossible to remove by censors.
This is actually a great point. I didn't even consider this since I'm so
used to having a high bandwidth internet. But yes, USENET really shines
in instances where bandwidth is severely limited. I was also reading one
of the posts here about relaying USENET through i2p and Tor. I find that fascinating and I think USENET has a use on that domain.
For Usenet to take off again reducing spam is essential. I suppose a
public news2mail gateway with anti spam filter should do the job while
making all mail clients a newsreader (thus almost all devices in the
world can instantly access Usenet)
I agree. It is essential to atleast find a decent way to remove spam. I
think the current solutions are good enough? It's a trade off between freedom and control. Moderation can be a slippery slope if it is the default state. I think the current way of doing things in USENET, where
most groups are unmoderated with a few moderated ones is the right approach.
I've been mulling over this for a while now, but I think it would really
help entice people if there is something like a "web browser"-esque interface for USENET. Where you can just open a program and it has an address bar where you can type the "address" of the heirarchy that want
to go to.
So, for example, instead of typing "facebook.com" you can just type "alt.fan.usenet" and it will load a rudimentary narkive-like layout that displays all the recent threads for that newsgroup. That "browser" will
then have a simplified "account creation" menu that they can just go through to allow them to create a USENET account from either AIOE or Eternal September.
But if that ever happens, then Eternal September will just repeat itself
as more freedom-loving people who are used to the social media circlejerk trundle along USENET again.
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* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)