We're the Usenet Big-8 Management Board. Ask us anything about Usenet, the Internet's oldest surviving discussion network!

There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Glad to see you're getting back to it. What apps would you recommend to get back into Usenet? I lost my floppies many, many moons ago.

There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Glad to see you're getting back to it. What apps would you recommend to get back into Usenet? I lost my floppies many, many moons ago.

Jason: Thunderbird is the most prevalent. Pan is great on Linux.

I sometimes like to idly dream up alternatives to the current social media landscape, with its surveillance/advertising and centralized control. The first obstacle I see in alternative systems that are more p2p is spam. Usenet faced that crisis first - any insights or thoughts about how communities/technologies can be built that would be resistant to spam without some kind of centralized control?

Tristan: Back in 1998 some denizens came up with a proposal for Usenet II, which was intended to mitigate a lot of the spam issues without sacrificing (too much of) the decentralized nature of the original Usenet. Sadly, the plans never came to fruition. Tackling spam on Usenet has instead taken the form of cancelbots, moderated newsgroups, and (lately) waiting for spammers in general to lose interest.

I always felt Reddit was an evolution of Usenet groups. Do you see a future where Usenet evolves again and becomes a better and decentralized Reddit?

Usenet was always anonymous and decentralized, but the big evolution leading to user adoption since then has been post scoring (since slashdot) and upvotes/downvotes and karma - or basically gamification.

This usually requires user registration and accounts in a central database. But since then a number of federated identity systems have developed, as well as private/public key methods of keeping an anonymous yet decentralized identity and scores (cough blockchain cough).

Along with a modern client supporting seamless image and video posting (or a better binary storage system than uuenncode), this would be a really cool thing.

Any such plans?

Jason: I think this sounds like a good idea. Things like this have been suggested in the past. Someone just needs to see them through. Usenet is open. We personally don't have any plans to reinvent it, but we would love to see positive changes that keep the decentralized simple aspects of Usenet.

Rayner: Reddit certainly feels like it has a lot of the same spirit as Usenet to me too. As for whether Usenet will have a resurgence as a decentralised forum for conversations, that all depends on the users. We're doing what we can to remind people that Usenet exists and make it easier for more folks to participate.

The Big 8 hierarchy hasn't had a group added in eight years, and for the last decade (at least) has had more group deletions than additions. Some areas, like rec.games, are painfully outdated in topicality.

Do you foresee a future where a Big 8 group gets created again? If so, under what fantastical circumstances?

Tristan:

Anyone is free to propose the creation of a new group using the official procedure. We've in fact had one or two expressions of interest in the past year, but so far no one has followed through with a creation proposal. So it seems there are some people still thinking about creating new groups. If anyone is interested in doing so, we'd be happy to talk to them!

I think this is a big reason why usenet faded while bulletin boards and social media skyrocketed. It has always been way too hard to create new groups. On Reddit I can click a button and create a new space. If nobody uses it, it fades away or gets adopted by a new set of users. On usenet I have to propose it then have a discussion.

Rayner: Just as a personal opinion here (with the caveat that the others may not agree), I also think it would be good to streamline the group creation process. The current procedure makes a lot of assumptions that may no longer be true, such as "Usenet might become unmanageably messy from the sheer volume of new groups" or "It will be clear when a new group is warranted because the users for it will already be discussing those topics somewhere else on Usenet". With that said, it's still good to get some idea of whether there are enough people around to keep a conversation going in a new group. We'll be considering some of these admin procedures we've inherited, and figuring out if they still make sense for today's Usenet.

Think there may be a double-entendre in Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends?

Rayner: We have no idea if anyone in Green Day has heard of Usenet, but you might enjoy knowing that the 16th of January this year was the 10,000th of September 1993

Do the newsgroups log upload or download activity?

If so who is this information turned over to?

Tristan: Usenet is a decentralized network; each participating server is free to set its own logging and retention policies. Whatever provider you use may or may not be logging traffic from its own users.

Jason: I can tell you from experience that the new server that I use, INN, only logs basic information like what a post ID and who posted it to keep track of potential spammers. It doesn't log IP addresses like a web server.

What was the big/main idea behind the creation of Usenet and how long did it take for the creation of Usenet?

What was the big/main idea behind the creation of Usenet and how long did it take for the creation of Unsenet?

Jason: It started as a research project between UNC and Duke University in late 1979. It was a way to get a private network between these schools who didn't have ARPAnet access. in 1980, it was presented at the USENIX conference and took off from there.

Rayner:

Usenet grew fast after its initial launch. There were 3 participating sites in 1979, 100 sites in 1981, over 500 by 1983, and 940 by 1984. Most early adopters were universities and tech companies, each of which might have dozens or hundreds of users.

Tristan:

Usenet quickly attracted a user base in the millions, and by 1984 it was estimated to account for 85% of all network traffic at participating sites. At its peak in the late 1990s, Usenet was seeing 20,000 people post 300,000 unique messages per day, amounting to some 2 GB of new text daily.

If you could pick any one Big-8 group to again reach the absurd levels of activity and vibrancy of the early '90s, which?

Jason: Good question! While it was never super popular, I would love to see the humanities.* hierarchy get more love and new groups. Also, sci.archaeology.moderated was my goto newsgroup when I was in college.

Tristan: comp.ai (but then again, I'm biased because I'm an AI researcher and also moderator of that group). My non-conflict-of-interest choice would be rec.humor.funny. Brad Templeton did a phenomenal job as editor for that group.

Rayner: As a vintage computing nerd, I'd love to see a new heyday for groups like
comp.sys.atari.st and comp.sys.sinclair. I miss rec.humor.funny too, the archive is still online at netfunny.com but I feel like topical jokes don't really work so well when they're 20 years late.

How do you feel about the common use of usenet these days being piracy?

Are any of you active members of the scary devil monastery?

Rayner: I lurk and know the necessary secret rites, but I'm not quite enough of a sysadmin to be an active member :-) I've met a few of the old regulars in the pub, and can confirm that the newsgroup nickname is entirely appropriate.

• Which resources would you recommend for someone who hasn't used Usenet before (clients, servers, groups, …)
• Do you see any future in bridges like nntpit?
• What should I do if I want to setup an internal NNTP server for my club/school/company/…
• What should I expect if I want to setup an NNTP server that's talking to other servers?

• Jason: I wrote some tutorials for complete newbies using Thunderbird since it is available for every OS
• Tristan: I'm all for NNTP gateways like nntpit and Gmane, as they allow for reading threaded discussions in a sane(r) and more versatile interface. But these things should generally be run on a dedicated NNTP server that isn't connected to the rest of Usenet, because the communities they bridge generally don't follow the same rules of Netiquette.
• Jason: Take a look at the documentation for INN. Join newsgroups like news.admin.peering to get feeds from other people and news.software.nntp for help setting up the server
• Jason: If you care about text only newsgroups, 20GB and 1GB of RAM will do plenty. A cheap VPS is really all you need.

Rayner: Usenet clients, I'm using Microplanet Gravity at the moment, which is slightly clunky but decent as a stand-alone application. Thunderbird has newsgroup support built-in, and may be a nice familiar interface for anyone who's used to using it for mail.

What is the most comprehensive archive that's freely available today, specifically of the 90s to early 2000s?

Jason: archive.org has done a fantastic job of keeping archives in .mbox format. You can open mbox files with Thunderbird with an addon which is super useful for catching up on Usenet history.

What do you think about Usenet mainly being known for piracy these days?

Rayner: As a wise man once wrote, the street finds its own uses for things. I do think it's strange that Usenet took off as a file-sharing platform, because it's a ridiculously inefficient way to move bulk data. Everything needs to be text-encoded in some way, there's no guarantee that all posts will make it to all servers, and posts get propagated all over the network regardless of whether any end-user specifically requests them or not. The only thing I can see that makes it good for piracy is its distributed nature, but even there things like Bittorrent do the job far more sensibly. Or so I hear.

Are you the Cabal?

Rayner: There is, of course, no Cabal :-) To give a somewhat serious answer, though, the anarchic nature of Usenet means the Board only has whatever influence everyone else chooses to give it.

Jason: I assume you mean this cabal. Any other cabals that we may or may not be involved with will not be spoken of upon threat of death and eternal punishment. Anyway, no we aren't and I recomment checking out the Usenet history section of David C. Lawrence's Managing Usenet. He has his colleagues tried to democratize the Big-7 hierarchies (humanities.* hadn't been created yet) instead of having a secret cabal of news server admins. This book was published 7 years before the board was formed in 2003 but he does a great job of talking about why the board was needed.

Are you going to bring back Serdar Argic? Kinda miss him.

Jason: No, but we would gladly welcome Kibo.

Tristan: Personally I'm holding out for the return of Ed "Man As Old As Coal" Conrad.

Rayner: I hope Mr. Argic is spending a happy retirement somewhere with Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel.

Does the Usenet Oracle still haunt your servers?

Jason: Sadly, no but there are archives available.

Who do you think would win in a fight: One 20-foot tall Tim Berners-Lee vs. 20 1-foot tall Linus Torvaldses?

Rayner: My money's on the 20 Linuses, that's gonna be an overwhelming tide of sarcastic flaming.

Jason: Linus's by sheer grit alone. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.

Tristan: Archimedes Plutonium would sweep in to crush them both.

How difficult is it to stay relevant when you have the tech giants like Facebook doing similar things?

Tristan: Usenet's transparency and lack of centralized control give it important advantages over newer forms of social media. It's versatile, resilient, and resistant to censorship in ways that Facebook and Twitter can never be.

I have a few questions. 1. As far as I know all groups within Usenet big 8 are a textbase group. This means you cannot post files along with the text like Reddit for example. Do you planning a system or something so it would easier for new user to get interact with Usenet?

1. I heard that to run a usenet server or service is expensive. That's why nowadays most of the usenet backbone or infrastructure is own by only several companies. What is your view as Usenet big 8 management board regarding this issue.

Rayner: I agree that the text-only requirement of most Usenet groups is awkward when someone really needs to reference an image or other file. One downside of Usenet being open and decentralised is that it's unbelievably hard to change an established way of doing things because of the sheer number of people using software that's been written or configured under the old assumptions. I'd currently recommend hosting images on Imgur and posting a link.
As for running your own NNTP server: you can do this cheaply with modest hardware and bandwidth, if you're only interested in text groups. You can download the INN server software for free, and ask in news.admin.peering for other admins to peer with. See Jason's tips above (https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/nn4vp8/were\_the\_usenet\_big8\_management\_board\_ask\_us/gzsmjz1/). It will help a lot to have some background knowledge of Unix/Linux administration.

I ran my own NNTP server back in the early 90's. Got rid of it a few years later due to the spamming. Back then, I remember having our server download EVERYTHING and it amounted to about 9GB/day, which back in the 90's I thought was alot.

Question: What is the current daily traffic if one was to subscribe to all the groups ?

Jason:

Text only newsgroups: 2-3GB per month

Binary groups: I hear it's a few TB per month but my server doesn't carry them so I can't tell you exact numbers.

What are your suggestions for long-term preservation of Usenet posts? I work with the Royal Library which already do web archival, but would really like to make sure we also properly preserve Danish Usenet posts. Who should I contact?

Jason: Contact archive.org. I don't know who is responsible for their Usenet archives, but they do a fantastic job.

The world of alt. still exists? Wow! I spent far too much time on Usenet back when the internet was much slower and far more limited.

What would you say is the biggest draw Usenet has today that keeps people coming back when so much is faster and easier on the open web?

[deleted]

Jason: There will always be hobbyists like me to run servers that don't carry binaries just because we can. If the binary groups all dried up, it wouldn't kill Usenet.

Jason: Usenet is very difficult to police. While you can be banned from a moderated group, you can't be banned or shadow banned from any unmoderated group. This puts the onus on you to filter out anything you don't want to see. A lot of people like that. If you're a jerk, it may feel like you are being ignored and that's probably because you're on everyone's filter list.

How long does Usenet have left? By most measures it's an inferior 'product',

Jason: It will be around as long as there is at least one server left. It has years to go.

Rayner: Usenet will last for as long as people want to keep using it. As for whether it's inferior to a centrally-controlled social network, I guess it depends what you want out of it, but I think the network will last longer if there's a conscious effort to make things less mysterious for new users.

Isn't this AMA breaking the USENET rules? You know, the rule to not talk about USENET?

Rayner: No, that's not Usenet, you're thinking of Fi... wait, dammit, that was close