Here's a pretty good eulogy for the Usenet, from LWN in... 2005
Some names are definitely hilarious though
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
A quick Google search indicates that apparently the Fred guy was active in the Usenet around 2005 and contributed to many flames. So maybe he made a few enemies? Or just one enemy with a lot of free time?
Remember, kids: don't get into useless arguments on the internet, you never know if the other person is a nutjob
@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🤣
Can you imagine creating a dumb newsgroup in 1988 like
alt.config.christina.[redacted].needs.to.get.a.life
and that message is still available for all the world to see 32 years later?