I downloaded my first warez from binaries groups. Some say they're still alive and kicking on paid servers, but I think all downloads have moved to the web or p2p nowadays
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.
The most similar thing to newsgroups today is Reddit, and I really enjoy following some communities.
Usenet had excellent usability, but Reddit has better moderation tools.
In the end, as experts say, tools don't create communities, they just allow members to find each other.