The nightmare is over? I've used Usenet for years. Most serious users filter out any post originating from G2 to do away with Google posts. It's been a huge source of spam and annoyance.
Usenet gets better as it gets smaller, honestly. Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active. Several groups in the comp* hierarchy are active. Thunderbird, claws-mail, sylpheed, tin, slrn, alpine, neomutt all handle Usenet just fine. Visit http://newsgroupreviews.com for a list of providers, some free, some paid.
Is there a broader tutorial for this, newsgroups mostly missed me, I don't really grok how they fit into the greater internet or how their hosting works or why you have to pay a separate provider
As for "why pay separate provider" -- that would be because circa 2000 most ISP's dropped offering Usenet access for their customers as part of the deal, which created a market for the paid providers.
In the dark ages when internet access was limited and/or via dialup for most of us, there were several tools and protocols to work with what we had: email, ftp and usenet were some of the main ones. Usenet was basically a primordial set of distributed forums platform (and quasi-social network) where copies of the data were stored locally. It was how a lot of information got disseminated prior to the mid-90's when the web took off and then over.
IMO an analogy to modern times would be a federated Reddit. I'd liken it to Lemmy but don't have enough experience with it to be sure it doesn't ruin my analogy in some way :)
It's probably better, on a technical level, than any of the fediverse stuff. I understand that Usenet works as a gossip protocol with nodes sharing everything they have (and haven't filtered) while Fediverse usually relies on directly contacting the origin server over IP. The integration between different instances on Mastodon and Lemmy is nothing like Usenet. The integration in the Fediverse is limited to following users, liking posts and replying to posts on other servers, using your federated identity on your server.
Update: I actually used Usenet a bit yesterday, mostly reading administrators explaining how the system works, and deleting spam. It's a cool system, I guess.
It should be possible to have other things built on top of the protocol. The protocol is a store-and-forward broadcast system, and is mostly agnostic to what goes in the packets, although if you want to add a group, each server operator has to agree to carry it, and they can have server-specific restrictions on things like message sizes, dropping messages outside the limits, so it isn't reliable. If you wanted to make a Usenet group simulating Reddit, you could easily pass votes through the system. Clients would have to interpret them, so you'd have to write your own client.
It's tolerant of spam as long as it isn't extremely excessive. There was talk of de-peering Google due to a large volume of spam, before Google made the decision itself, but most groups are about half spam besides that. The low volume of actual users contributes to this.
There's a group, I think news.admin.peering, for requesting your own server to be connected to the network. I see many successful requests from various people in the group's history. The network is fully decentralized, so being connected is reliant on at least one other person being willing to connect to you.
There was a period of time where the notion that everything would be archived was unfathomable to the average user. Sure, in theory it could be. But storage was expensive and the value of storing that stuff was low.
Unfortunately, when DejaNews came out it became clear that at least one person out there recorded everything. Many an embarrassing post of mine was unearthed. When one has tens of thousands of posts and is young & stupid, that was bound to happen. Of course now all these years later I can barely find any of my posts on the internet, embarrassing or otherwise.
>I don't really grok how they fit into the greater internet or how their hosting works or why you have to pay a separate provider
In much the same way that you need a specialized email client to use IMAP/SMTP, you need a specialized client that speaks NNTP to access usenet.
The providers are heterogeneous but usually are basically beefy servers connected to fat pipes to handle the massive volume of traffic, which is why you typically need to pay for access.
One way to think usenet/newsgroups is as a set of distributed peer-to-peer mailing lists.
You post a message to your (NNTP) server. Your server connects to other peer NNTP servers to transfer messages back and forth, so eventually your message will propagate throughout the usenet network. (40 years ago peering was through UUCP, etc, and done at night when phone calls were cheaper or only to other local numbers so it might take a week, now it doesn't take that long. See also, bang paths).
I think you can run Leafnode if you want to host your own, small groups. Otherwise (my understanding) you need to peer with other providers and be able to consume something like 30-100TB/day if you want all groups on the network (unless you can find providers to peer with that let you limit groups)
Note that 30-100TB/day is mostly copies of pirated copies of movies, getting re-encrypted each time so you have to pay someone to get the encryption key and to avoid detection.
Well, at this point the mainstream usenet network is dedicated to piracy. That's what it is - 100% piracy. The only reason they use NNTP instead of something like BitTorrent and call them "articles" instead of "files" is to maintain plausible deniability that that isn't what they're doing.
The textual discussion network may as well be its own wholly separate network. I only know of Eternal September, but I'm sure there are other servers.
If Usenet's requirements haven't increased in a 2-3 decades, and in its moribund state I expect they haven't, then it should be trivial to run Usenet servers on almost any device, at least in terms of resources.
The principle use-case for Usenet has always been small, controlled-access networks.
That's what ARPANET and the early Internet were, where "small" meant < 1 million active participants and "controlled access" meant meeting the requirement of belonging to one of a limited number of academic institutions, tech companies, government agencies, or select military units. Total Usenet participation in April 1988 were 140,000 readers, by Eric Reid's DEC surveys, as cited in John S. Quarterman's The Matrix (1990):
Spinning up an NNTP group for internal company communications, for a family group, or for a (sufficently tech-savvy) organisation or hobby group would be a viable option. My experience is that peak group experience tends to occur with somewhere between about 5 and maybe 1,000 participants on the high end, and that's being generous. In practice, 5--50 is probably a better sweet spot.
The technology isn't the stumbling point nearly so much as convincing people to use the service. In some industries, privacy and disclosure rules may preempt usage (e.g., healthcare, finance). And the fact that Usenet has no intrinsic authentication or attestation of identity (though these can be provided by additional mechanisms such as PGP/GPG signatures) means that publicly accessible newsgroups are likely to be nonviable given malicious actors.
What's underappreciated about much of the early Internet / online world is how small most of the "large" (as in influential) groups or movements were. Usenet, the WELL, Slashdot, and early blogging had core groups of perhaps a few hundred to a few thousand people, possibly fewer. Yes, there were additional participants in many cases, but in terms of how concentrated the bulk of activity was, small.
Hmm and if you limit the use case to those small groups, there are a lot more options now. There's the whole Fediverse stack, of course, but also lots of stand alone forum options you can self host. And why self host when there are also lots of low-cost community platform options out there?
So, that really wasn't the original question, so noting that we've moved on from that ...
Basic protocols such as NNTP and IRC have the benefit of being stable, small (running a Usenet server on an OpenWRT router with additional writeable storage would be doable, running a Fediverse instance not so much), and being relatively client-independent and even protocol-flexible. NNTP <-> SMTP gateways are, for example, A Thing, and people can participate in such newsgroups from either Usenet or email clients. Similarly Web gateways to either NNTP or SMTP systems.
The flipside is that the underlying protocols are also simple and absent some additional tooling lack much of what it is that people have come to expect from more recent messaging systems:
- Mobile device access. That's probably the big one, though I'd argue that for useful discussion you're better off eliminating mobile use. I've commented that losing a keyboard and being forced to a small screen cuts my effective IQ by half, and that quality of discussion on public systems also seems strongly negatively affected by mobile use. Read-only access might be a compromise, with some "I have something to say but will wait until I can access a Real Computer" might be an option. Android + Termux + Bluetooth keyboard meets my minimums as "real computer", FWIW.
- Formatted text, usually a flavour of Markdown or some "smart editor" for normies. Then again, we seem to survive with much less than that on HN.
- Images. That's the principle feature NNTP lacks natively, though they can be shoehorned in via uuencoded posts. Along with audio and video, the ability to create multimedia posts (popular, occasionally useful, terribly abused) might be an objection raised by many.
- Third-party clients. The great strength/weakness of NNTP and SMTP are that neither are locked to a single client, or Web client (though the latter is available). Having a specific tailored client program (tin, slrn, Emacs, pan, etc.) is useful because the features of the platform are strongly supported by those clients. Downside is Yet Another Piece of Software to install and train on. In the mobile world apps have been breaking the notion of everything-in-the-browser, though often bringing along their own set of issues, most notably surveillance, but also general issues of design, UI/UX, maintenance, security, and abandonment.
The initial question addressed could and the answer really is "trivially", from a technical level.
Yours is "should", and as I'd hinted in my initial response, that's far more social and up for debate (as we're doing here).
But at least you're demonstrating a exception to Ian Malcolm's could/should criticism.
It's actually pretty trivial. Eternal-september seems happy to peer with anyone who asks (just send an email), and there's a newsgroup specifically for asking for peers; everyone who posts there gets lots of offers pretty quick.
No, NNTP is a TCP protocol. Early USENET moved messages over systems like UUCP.
NNTP is to USENET what ActivityPub is Mastadon. USENET is a confederation of cooperating peers, currently using NNTP, but it could be any mechanic to move the messages. You could wire it up using SCP I imagine if you were motivated to do so.
Specifically, the NNTP protocol does not talk directly to how USENET works. For example, you can find out how to exchange messages for particular topics using NNTP, but not how to actually create those topics. That left to the actual software and administrators. USENET using the concept of "Control Messages" to exchange information about things like newsgroup status, but the content and format of those messages are not specified in NNTP.
As a USENET peer, pretty much all peers are "equal". You host your own news server, you tell it what groups you're interested in, it peers with another host and exchanges messages about those groups. At that level, they're equal.
But just because you create a newsgroup on your system, doesn't mean that group is instantly propagated across the planet. That's where the USENET governance kicks in as to who is going peer and distribute new groups, or not. Each individual relationship within the peer group can be different.
I can't say exactly how a news client differs from a news server. It may not have any of the peering logic, posting and reading groups directly from a server which then handles the peering. News servers "peer", clients are lighter weight.
FTP splitting the data and control ports was a smart implementation. It allowed for optimization of the ports (one focused on throughput) and meant that control could still occur even while long responses were happening on the data port.
Well... RFC 953 specifically mentions using PORT to send a file to a line printer so that seems intentional. [1]
For streaming mode STORe/RETRieve the connection closes at the EOF so you could send the request but the response would be lost.
[1]
It is possible for the user to specify an alternate data port by
use of the PORT command. The user may want a file dumped on a TAC
line printer or retrieved from a third party host.
Facebook and Reddit are better ways to talk to people, but you're already here on Hacker News so it's apparent they don't suit your tastes. If you're concerned about Internet centralization, learning other systems that may be less centralized is great, but you know you won't be using it to talk to people you'd talk to on Facebook. And if you're concerned about the Internet itself, you learn ham radio.
It's worth it in order to experience a more efficient discussion UI. The difficulty is in finding newgroups where actual worthwhile discussion is going on.
The problem with ham radio is, that most people are not that interested in the tech itself. In the past, even if you didn't care about tech, you could still buy some radio kit and join the hobby for the "chatting" part. Now, you can get 'chat' everywhere, a lot easier and cheaper to set up, and you also gain privacy (encryption, no real-world indentifiers etc.), although I prefer the "open forum" type of ham radio communication, because well... it's meant to be open.
It's same with usenet... you can get the "chat"/discusson part everywhere now (reddit,...), usually with a bit better UI and it doesn't really offer much more than that. Back in the time, it was the best (and well.. the only) thing to have.. now with alternatives, people move elsewhere, and unless you find a niche you're interested in and a community exists on usenet, you won't have much to do there.
> you can get the "chat"/discusson part everywhere now (reddit,...),
There's no organic discussion happening on reddit. Even the TV show subreddits are tightly moderated these days. If you try and 'discuss' in a way that invites genuine criticism and isn't just mindless cheerleading of the product on offer you'll find yourself railroaded off the site in short order, and the political/real-world/location subs are an order of magnitude more controlled.
You can’t get the efficient discussion UI of usenet clients anywhere, except maybe on mailing lists with a specialized mail client like Mutt. Usenets clients were peak discussion UI. Reddit is a far, far cry from it.
It relies on keyboard navigation, threading, and per-message tracking of read/unread status, and on subject lines. The threaded view with one line per message allows a quick overview over which parts of a discussion one has already read or which are new, or are still unread from the last time. You usually have a split screen where one part of the screen shows that thread tree and the other shows the currently focused message. Focusing a message marks it as read. Common key bindings are pressing Tab to jump to the next unread message, and Space to page-down through the contents of messages. This makes it very efficient to catch up on a discussion (or really, to catch up on all ongoing discussion over all subscribed newsgroups) even after a few days (or longer). And if you reply some time later, you can still expect other participants to pick up your reply and easily see its context.
Replies don’t get lost because the discussion has moved on or the thread is a day old, like they do on HN and Reddit. This enables long-running, structured discussions. There are more usability aspects related to the text editor used, such as editor commands for handling quotes when replying. There are of course the usual(?) forum features of being able to ignore (filter out) specific users, and other features like automatically highlighting/ranking/filtering messages based on other criteria. But the main usability benefits come from per-message read/unread tracking, keyboard navigation, and the compact thread representation.
Note how on HN and Reddit you have threading, but because each message is displayed inline, you see less of a thread at once. You also see only one topic (thread) at once, whereas in a Usenet client you see all recent or currently ongoing threads in the same view as the intra-thread structure. This causes a more shared experience of subscribers of a newsgroup being aware of the current ongoing threads (over days and weeks) than on Reddit and HN. And most importantly, when returning to a discussion thread, on Reddit and HN you don’t see which messages you have already read and which you haven’t, and thus threads die out after a short time, and longer-form discussions are not practical. The experience is profoundly different.
I literally write a briefing paper advising my university to clamp down on the nascent web and continue with gopher which was much more systematic and organized.
You're not wrong - the web is very disorganized. This makes it more valuable to shareholders, as they can design sites to present us with whatever extracts optimal value at the present moment. That's how Google gets to interpose itself between us and what we're looking for, and redirect us to SEO spam pages.
Part of the background for this is that over the past month or more, Usenet has been under an unprecedented spam attack from Google Groups that Google isn't doing anything about. People have resorted to filtering everything coming from Google Groups, with a white list, and there are voices calling for de-peering of Google Groups from the Usenet federation.
And it is also /interesting/ that the evil one's [1] blog post mentions "and spam" as a reason for this, but fully fails to mention that 99.8% of the "spam" flood is coming from their own system.
Sounds like the barbarians are sacking Rome. What happened to mighty Google's thirst for blood and will to dominate the Internet? It feels like they've just started accepting being helpless to stop all this spam.
Google has now an CEO who is outsourcing everything to cut costs.
Google already had a quality problems before due to culture of zero support and dropping projects after their managers' got promoted, but now they have a problem with keeping up to any standards.
That's how it works when you offshore everything - where the main criteria is price and nobody cares about quality at all. They could offshore to mid cost countries, but they offshore to cheapest bidders.
Well, Alphabet has had falling profit margins for sometime. I thought their reorg was stupid since the company’s profits all came from ads on Google’s web services. Rather than reorg, I would have just canceled the unprofitable bits.
As for sending stuff offshore, they should seriously rid themselves of this products/services instead. They need to cut costs, headcount, and company complexity. They need to focus on their core product before they die: search and ads.
It doesn't matter how much money USENET makes one company, what matters is what it represents. Surrendering USENET entirely to abuse means we're losing one of the last vestiges of the ARPANET. It brings great shame and dishonor that Google won't fight for it.
As the song goes, "We haven't seen that spirit here since 1969." Okay, so maybe it's more like 1989, a few years before Eternal September[1] in 1993, when the deluge started for real.
But, I'll tell you what we're not losing when Google drops support for USENET: the archives. And, IMO, that's where the real value in Google Groups[2] lies, and has for decades.
Yes. Go to `groups.google.com`, switch "My Groups" to "All groups of messages" and type in the name of your favorite newsgroup in the search field. You should see links to newsgroups pop up. The archives are contained at those links. You can search them reasonably well, but browsing them is tough, because of the 2 decades worth of spam that's accumulated in them.
Just get a news reader and pay money for a usenet provider. (They cost money because 99.99% of usenet traffic is pirated movies and providers know that and optimize for that bandwidth-heavy use case)
And hope the provider actually carries text groups and not only pirate movie groups.
I'm certainly not losing anything. Only people who need Google services to access Usenet are losing. And I make no apology for being elitist here - some clubs are better when they are mostly frequented by the elite.
Wish there was some way to give the data Google obtained in the Deja News acquisition back to the public, i.e., allow free public access to all of it as Deja News was doing at the time.
(After the acqusitition, for a while Javascript was required to access comp.unix.* groups via Google Groups. Eventually, after years went by, this was fixed. But even then some of the data from these groups and other computing related groups is missing. Neither Google Groups, nor any of the well-known spools from individual archivists, contain _all_ of the data from what was available before the Google acquisition.)
The files are compressed mbox format. Anybody who used unix email in the 80s or 90s, before Maildir took over (rightly!) knows what that means, but it's a single text file with all your emails. (or usenet posts in this case).
I've downloaded a few newsgroups that I care about so I can search offline since Google usenet search is not very good.
It is a shame and a huge missed opportunity that archive.org doesn't have a usable usenet browser/searching. I would build it for free. Heck, I would pay them (well, I do donate).
Sort of – for the one newsgroup I'm interested in (uk.railway), the Giganews archive only seems to go back to the early 2000s – whereas I know that Google had posts going back into the 90s, but sadly it's one of the groups where access was blocked on account of "too much spam" (probably facilitated by Google Groups in the first place).
This is something archive really should put some resources towards. Its discoverability of items is really poor. Going thru archive to find things is like going to that one consignment shop where the owner bought all of the businesses around him going out of business for the past 30 years and he tossed it all in a warehouse. You know it is in there but finding anything is terrible.
If it's available for public download, then someone else can do it if they have the demand. I wouldn't ask archive.org to tie up their resources when they're already struggling with lawsuits.
I very recently have been accepted as the moderator of an abandoned, moderated group.
As such, I needed to find a Usenet provider who would accept posting into moderated groups, from a moderator.
I originally contacted Eternal September, and Wolfgang informed me my account had been configured to allow such posting, but it does not work ("account not authorized") and now he does not respond to email.
I then contacted four commercial providers, all of whom did not know about moderated groups, and either failed to respond in a timely manner (a week) or failed to grasp the concept of moderated groups;
1. Giganews
2. Tweaknews
3. Eweka
4. Usenetserver
Giganews first line support did not know about moderated news-groups. I explained, and once the support staffer understood, a support ticket was created. Giganews claim a few hours response time. When asked about this, they then say up to three days. After seven days, I cancelled the support ticket.
Tweakness, Eweka and Usenetserver I think are in fact the same company. I could be completely wrong, but they all use the same support software, have the same options in the drop down lists on their sites, and so on.
All did not know about moderated news-groups, and all were unable to grasp the concept, and all then went into that failure mode, where support is giving the wrong answers to questions, not paying attention to what is written, not reading the history of communication, and so finally going into a loop which consisted of them telling me "you need an account to post" (where they meant posting normally - not as a moderator), which they had said before, and which I had replied to before (explaining again about moderated news-groups, to which they explained Usenet is not moderated and anyone can post, etc, etc, etc).
Check out Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC ("Panix"). They run their own news server, know about moderated newsgroups, host several newsgroup moderation teams, and have reasonable rates ($100/year) for NNTP Usenet access and a Unix shell account.
AFAIK all the major usenet providers except for EternalSeptember (which is for discussion) are just download sites for pirated movies. That's why they don't know about moderated groups, and why they have the price structure they do.
I should update this to say it is alive but unwell - text-based Usenet is apparently now mostly relegated to cranks who get banned everywhere else, as well as discussion of the Usenet system itself. However, there are several providers (not just E-S), and it's beginning to enjoy a little resurgence in 2023 due to what's been happening in the social media sphere. I encourage everyone to try it out. I made an account on E-S using my email address, and connected with Thunderbird.
It was tongue in cheek, as that’s exactly what they said to search for.
To be fair though, even without the quotes the first 4 links are the same! The query itself is also a poor representation of a good search query for Usenet clients.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not but the other Google search image had the search query in quotes which significantly limits potential search results.
I use DDG for ideological reasons but in my experience Google Search has always been the better engine when searching for specific queries while for general queries most search engines are roughly the same. In terms of overall performance I'd say Google takes the cake, followed by Brave and then DDG/Bing/...
I doubt that corporations have the right intentions when acquiring public services. In fact, I'm inclined to believe there is a conflict of interest, and their objective may be to prevent these services from flourishing, or to sabotage them in the long term. Immediate sabotage would cause public outrage, so it's likely more subtle. This concern is evident in the recent acquisitions of GitHub and Twitter.
Seems like this would be a great job for Internet Archive, but a cursory glance doesn't show it there. I get that the *.binaries could be too much and super illegal, but maybe the text ones.
> You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google Groups.
What about the newsgroups where access (including the archives!) had been blocked by Google for too much spam (maybe ironically facilitated by Google Groups in the first place)?
I guess one must ask El Reg to write about it. I think that might have been how it got solved a couple years ago when comp.lang.c and others were affected by this [1].
Currently, at least mozilla.support.seamonkey (not a USENET group, but from news.mozilla.org - which was shut down, but whose archived content would certainly be useful) is in that state at Google Groups. And yes, IIRC the only SPAM in recent times in that group had been posted via Google Groups...
Great. Now let's revive Usenet and make it a bit complicated as having to use a specialized reader app like tin and make it a resort for people who are a bit sick of the New Internet.
Literally all my recruiter spam is coming from groups. Even when I worked at Google internally I raised a ticket with full info of what’s going on and they still haven’t fixed it.
(Yes I have the “can’t add me to groups” button on).
A random ticket thrown into the abyss might not get any traction, but I find a well considered ticket with appropriate instructions typically results in help. Sometimes it takes a quick ping on chat or finding the right person, but people are generally helpful in routing bugs.
I'm regularly pleasantly surprised when I file a bug for something on the other side of the company and get proper engagement on it.
> Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam
I don't know why but I feel this was written by a young gun who doesn't know how usenet, irc etc works and just wants to push everyone to discord and slack.
Text-only Usenet shouldn't cost much to host and operate, and close to nothing if rethought to be distributed serverless p2p style, possibly encrypted. I was used in the past to wait ~3 days for my Fidonet post and their replies round trips, I don't think many people would mind waiting a few minutes for their local msg base to sync with the distributed cloud.
This post brought my down a rabbit hole of early internet technologies, leading to a search for the two PC newsmagazines I used to read for free as a teenager in my Bay Area suburb in the late 90's, which ended at this Usenet post hosted by... Google.
The file sharing is why most providers stopped hosting it and drove it into its niche. I wish it had never happened, and that the blasted fools responsible had been prosecuted. :-(
Ugh. Thanks for all your work on those issues though. It sounds like @cgrindel got somewhere with it.
While I understand the frustration, I see package managers and Bazel as quite distinct approaches, and I'm not surprised that they are incompatible. There shouldn't be anything incompatible between Firebase itself and Bazel – I can assure you that Bazel is used to build wildly esoteric things at Google – but the Cocoapods/SPM layer is sort of fighting an uphill battle because Bazel is built on the assumption that it's building everything itself.
I work on a very large mobile app that is built with Bazel, and can attest to how worth it the experience is at scale, but I realise it takes a lot of doing to make it work, and that doesn't pay off until a certain point.
I'm sorry I'm not able to help with a fix. That's down to my lack of expertise in the specifics of iOS builds.
I get the frustration, I really do. It makes sense that different Google technologies should work with each other like in this case, but I can see why this sort of thing slips through the cracks when the teams are so far removed from each other.
Regarding Bazel's ability to do this, I can't say for sure, but I see a common pattern in Bazel usage outside of Google where users expect it to work at a higher level than it does. At a fundamental level if you can do it on the command line by running commands and moving files around, then Bazel can do it (hermetically, reproducibly, etc). Big Bazel deployments build up a lot of build definitions that handle all these things and abstract away the details, and these may be what's missing.
Anecdotally, I work on a very large Android app, and it's all built with Bazel rules that are many layers deep of customisation. At the bottom somewhere is a `java_binary` rule or something like that from Bazel itself, but there's a lot of customisation to make it work for us. It sounds like this would be necessary to get Firebase working. Ultimately though if Xcode can build it, Bazel can script it.
As for Cocoapods/SPM etc, the reason I said these were at odds with the Bazel process is because Bazel is designed for a world without package managers where you just have all the code in your monorepo with the appropriate BUILD files, because this is how Google works. It sounds like there is tooling to work around this and get the code into the Bazel cache, but it's unlikely that automatically generating BUILD files is always going to get it right.
Except it doesn't? One of the reasons usenet is dying is because without some sort of group-global moderation, everyone sees different things.. Newcomers see piles of spam, and when you don't get replies you are never sure is this something you said, or was your message silently filtered out.
It's like a forum where the moderators only ever use shadow-bans. Most people would hate such thing.
Usenet's been on the up trend for years now. It was dying in the '00s and early '10s. Now it's recovering. People are tired of Discord and Reddit, and even Hacker News.
No, I never used usenet via google groups, this was Thunderbird + my ISP's NNTP server. Opening your favorite groups and seeing more spam than new threads was a big reason to quit.
(A second one was lack of support for multiple devices: messages read on laptop would not show up as read on desktop. Funnily enough, Google Groups solves that problem, but I could never stomach their interface)
So there is upstream spam filtering. Thiss seems to contradict what you said: "There is no administrative ostracism. Nobody gets kicked out by brownshirts for expressing their view."
Even if this stupid idea were true, in fact nobody prevents Usenet spammers from reaching those who want to be reached.
If you think that spam is a form of expression, and you're interested in it, all you have to do is post a few articles and use your real e-mail address in your From: header.
Then no overbearing NNTP server admin will stand between you and your spammer friends.
You've sorta got to trust your admin. If you don't, it's really pretty trivial to put up your own server (you can do it from home, you don't need a VPS, you don't even need constant connectivity) and then you just peer with as many servers as you can -- odds are not ALL of them are filtering those critically important posts calling Biden a pedophile or whatever.
Not having a centralized censorship team is a better solution than “Elon will buy it and replace the old brownshirts with new brownshirts”.
(Not expressing an opinion about the content moderators that work/worked at twitter/x; just the organizational structure that led to disaster over there).
Both those solutions are failures, but they aren't at all the only options (look at HN, for example). On a certain scale, public social forums need effective moderators.
I see; I was not aware that there is a specific connection between Nazis and the "brownshirt" term, though it is obviously a reference to some kind of uniform.
> I see; I was not aware that there is a specific connection between Nazis and the "brownshirt" term,
I genuinely appreciate and commend your honesty about the fact that you didn't previously know that.
Separately, it's an unfortunate that even on this forum, the term Brownshirt has been watered down to the point that it's lost its Nazi association completely, much like other Nazi terminology that has been rehabilitated in recent years.
I basically encountered the term only once or twice, in my distant past and have used it maybe as many times. It is not popular.
A Google n-gram comparison of "nazi" and "brownshirt" shows the latter to be vastly rare compared to the former.
I just compared several terms associated with the Nazis: brownshirt,wehrmacht,luftwaffe,hakenkreuz. Their popularity is in the same ballpark.
Luftwaffe is showing a strange resurgence, having overtaken brownshirt.
Brownshirt was on a popularity rise since 1960, but has declined recently. It is now only about 3 times more popular than hakenkreuz, though, which I would think is pretty obscure.
I think people tend to be relatively reluctant to do a dictionary lookup on a rarely heard word that is made of two everyday English words like "brown" and "shirt" and which is easily explained as a fairly obvious metaphor.
To the contrary, they did the right thing by admitting their ignorance in not knowing that Brownshirt refers to a group of Nazis. So the record shows that they were willing to learn. That's something.
In fact, according to a Google ngram and books search, no such term can be attested prior to the rise of the Nazis. There was no single-word brownshirt, capitalized or not, and brown shirt (two words) wasn't used as any sort of idiom referring to an oppressive military though or anything of the sort.
It also seems that a two-word form Brown Shirt also saw some use (in reference to the Nazis).
I think he's equating the different flavors of self professed socialists who get into a tizzy any time someone makes a joke online with Nazism. And also, I think it is deliberately hyperbolic so that only people with a sense of humor will refrain from getting in said predictable tizzy about it.
I think it's funny because it's only to the people the term applies that it isn't funny to draw the comparison. It's like a joke about the people who don't get the joke, it's very meta and it's an inside joke that most people get.
I hope you realize that you have given a link to an encyclopedia to show the definition of a word. The fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 2011, already gave a second definition of brownshirt:
>A racist, especially a violent, right-wing one.[0]
Oxford Dictionary has an even broader definition[1]
As noted by other users, "brownshirt" is also used to describe "anyone in authority."[2]
I actually debated writing "pedantism nazi" instead of "grammar nazi" because I knew you would make that exact argument that grammar is not relevant. I also considered "semantics nazi" but decided against it as semantics is "the study of meanings"[3], but it is clear that you are actually more concerned with creating records of fault and "ignorance",[4] while you allow yourself to define GP's transgression in vague terms like "equate" meaning anything from regarding as equal or equivalent to "comparable"[5]. You claim that the meaning is unambiguous yet this nonexistent second meaning is so prevalent that GP had never heard of the first one.
Using “brownshirt” for anyone in authority is clearly missing the point entirely. There is a reason the brownshirts were eliminated after the nazis came to power. They were violent gangs of nazi thugs operating outside the law to terrorize opponents. When the nazi party came to power they were not useful or necessary anymore, since now the party could just change the law and perform terror through official institutions.
Please stop using that term unless you're talking specifically about the worshippers of Kali who would strangle and rob travelers in India in the 19th century. It does not mean anything else. It can never mean anything else.
Why haven't you asked why I have recast "nazi" into meaning
>A person who is perceived to be authoritarian, autocratic, or inflexible; one who seeks to impose his or her views upon others[0]?
I am not working to recast anything. You conflated a moral argument that one should not use words that reference Nazism in any way with a factual evaluation of the meaning of the word necessarily being the object of that reference. Had you said "the usage of 'brownshirt' to mean 'one who abuses power' is not considered appropriate" that would be a different matter. What you said, however, is factually wrong; there is no equivalence being made between Nazism and "content moderation." That is to say, you should have said that the second definition is not appropriate, instead of denying it's existence to then change the meaning of the sentence such that it is then equating content moderation on private platforms with Nazism. Unless by "equating" you meant "to make comparable" where "comparable" means "an examination of two or more items to establish similarities and dissimilarities." I should mention that Oxford does not have "comparable" in "equating" and the definition of comparable above is almost certainly not what is meant by "equating" in any event.
I personally have never used "brownshirt" to mean "authoritarian." My motivation for my initial post was to show you with a simple double-meaning comment that words can have multiple meanings.
> "They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President."
Al Gore (October 2005), “Al Gore Addresses We Media”
All of the above are misuses of "brownshirt" by people who heard the word and, like I did, neglected to check a dictionary, thereby unwittingly invoking a Nazi reference.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that "brown shirt" nor "brownshirt" was used a metaphor for a person in any kind of role before the 1920's, when it came into use in reference to the Nazi storm troopers.
The "digital brownshirt" term was likely coined by someone who knows what "brownshirt" means; their intent is to express the idea that right-wing bloggers are like Nazis of the digital age. That use does not assigns a new meaning to the "brownshirt" constituent word.
I have seen the word very rarely myself; I passively learned about it decades ago, and have not seen it used since. I used it about once or twice myself. Since that time, I have become more fastidious about looking up unknown words (which has become easier, thanks to mobile devices!) It's highly probable that the person I saw using the term decades ago knew that it was a Nazi reference.
Words for clothing tend to shift their reference to the wearers of the clothing over time. Perhaps it was so ordinary that it never made it into literary record.
That's why the term "spam" was invented to describe USENET spam.
USENET comes from a more innocent time, when few institutions had firewalls, open (SMTP) mail relays were pretty common, and people logged into their systems over telnet.
Usenet gets better as it gets smaller, honestly. Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active. Several groups in the comp* hierarchy are active. Thunderbird, claws-mail, sylpheed, tin, slrn, alpine, neomutt all handle Usenet just fine. Visit http://newsgroupreviews.com for a list of providers, some free, some paid.