I’m not asking about how it is used for warez, since that is what it mostly hosting at this point… Nor am I asking why anyone should or should not start a community on USENET (many reasons why you wouldn’t/couldn’t).

Instead, I am asking why someone would only decide to engage with the textual, traditional, conversational aspects of USENET over modern tools like lemmy?

I could name a few I suppose:

  • Relative anonymity
  • Access to a large amount of history
  • Nostalgia
  • Communication with those who still frequent newsgroups

I don’t know how many more there are but I would like to hear your guys’ opinions in regards to those listed above and any others I may have missed.

  • resterWink@lemmy.darkc0de.oneOPEnglish
    1·
    9 hours ago

    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.