Here's a pretty good eulogy for the Usenet, from LWN in... 2005
Oh! Let's see what was popular in the Usenet!
alt.fan.*
aaron-carter
addams.family
adolf.hitler 🤨
austin-powers
bill-gates
bloodhound-gang
callista-flockhart
chocobo
courteney-cox
david-duchovny
dragonlance
dune
gillian-anderson
hello-kitty
jackques-chirac
jennifer-connely
jim-carrey
kevin-mitnick
lara-croft
lion-king.scar 😂
lucy-lawless
ninja-turtles
nutella
pam-anderson
power-rangers
pratchett
princess-diana
... wait what? STOP
@cfenollosa if you run across any good discussion groups post them up. I follow a few on my BBS (the alt.bbs groups are hit and miss though, mainly BBS ads now days). There are also a few good ones in comp.* that are still active
@mmn I'm trying to make a list of still active groups. Of course I can't check the full 60k groups, but I'm trying to curate those who used to be popular and still have some activity (comp, hardware, talk etc)
@cfenollosa this is literally the best thing I've heard this year, it's impossible to find references to active usenet groups now days. Are you going to publish this somewhere eventually?
@mmn Yes, I'll post them on this thread while I scavenger, and probably give this literal tootstorm some formatting into a blogpost.
You'll definitely see it around here for sure
@cfenollosa
I believe human attention works that way, specially as you get older and accustomed to some ways of interacting with your peers
@cfenollosa This is very suspicious🤣
i thought i'd check out alt.anarchism, but half of it is anti-Hillary spam and the other half is about the murder of Molly Tibbetts.
@Nikolai_Kingsley Yep, there are very very few active groups, and those are mostly populated by wackos.
i keep waiting for the Oldbies to return to talk.bizarre.
there's no indication they ever will, but i'm not going to let that stop me.
@Nikolai_Kingsley hope is the last thing one loses, they say ;)
I would honestly love a Usenet comeback. Too bad it will never happen.
@cfenollosa What do you mean? That's how your computer screen should look, right? Screenshot of my dwm setup attached. Nothing 1999 over that.
@liebach nice setup! My 1999 reference was about slrn and the Usenet, though. A real nostalgia trip
@cfenollosa Oh, now I get it. 😊 I didn’t look closely and assumed it was mutt, not slrn.
You know Usenet is almost-dead when there is not even spam in most groups.
Spammers have decided "it's not profitable to send a few bytes to these open boards anymore" and if you think about it it's kinda sad