Comment by terminalbraid
12 hours ago
Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.
Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.
Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.
> Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.
Except, unlike Reddit, it wasn't centralized nor owned by a single corporation.
Usenet users did not have to obey the rules and whims of any corporation and there was thriving ecosystem of feature rich, free and open Usenet clients.
I really miss having my own killfiles and regex search abilities that were common on Usenet clients, but is missing from the Reddit clients and its web UI.
I don’t believe it was or continually is limited to text only, but I do believe we had netiquette back then which helped to reconsider spamming internet with media and other decorators, only to have it all forgotten 72h later
Still is, but a bit empty. https://eternal-september.org/
Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.
The eternal September complaint comes to mind, but even eternal September was a jolly walk in the park compared to what modern social media has turned into.
> Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.
Spam filtering has improved a lot since the Usenet days, but even if it hadn't we had killfiles to deal with the spam and filtering out harrasers. Doing this today would be even easier with the help of LLMs.
What about the registration you find so painful? It takes a single command to register a nick, if that's what you mean.
In his defence, its a single command, if you know the command
This, which is not uniform across servers, and has more work if you want to do certificate-based auth. Additionally getting a nick cloak is good opsec and also extremely not uniform.
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