Hello, sorry for butting in!

Helm <nospam@please.inavlid> writes:
>
> I know alot of young and old people who know about Usenet and are
> tired of big tech censorship and algorthmitic manipulation of content
> feeds
>

This. I think USENET can still carve a specific niche for people who
want to have a way to disseminate information in a distributed way
without the content curation algorithms that these social media
platforms all do now.

While there is significant spam in USENET, I think it's a decent trade
off considering the freedoms that you can get with the protocol.

> Mailng lists and Usenet Newsgroups are the future. Facebook, reddit,
> and even 4chan recently, are all censoring posts. Mailing groups (and
> some Usenet newsgroups) have moderation, but once a post is approved
> it comes to the top of the post - the user can decide what they do and
> don't want to see with a killfile. Here there is no subtle
> manipulation. Even web forums are better than Reddit/Facebook. Usenet
> also shines because it can be accessed without a web browser - a news
> client or any mail client linked to a news2mail gateway can access
> Usenet. In certain African and European countries where people have to
> pay for each megabyte/gigabyte they use, Usenet is perfect because
> there is no extra html bloat with the postings whatsover. It is also
> decentralized, so posts are impossible to remove by censors.
>

This is actually a great point. I didn't even consider this since I'm so
used to having a high bandwidth internet. But yes, USENET really shines
in instances where bandwidth is severely limited. I was also reading one
of the posts here about relaying USENET through i2p and Tor. I find that
fascinating and I think USENET has a use on that domain.

> For Usenet to take off again reducing spam is essential. I suppose a
> public news2mail gateway with anti spam filter should do the job while
> making all mail clients a newsreader (thus almost all devices in the
> world can instantly access Usenet)
>

I agree. It is essential to atleast find a decent way to remove spam. I
think the current solutions are good enough? It's a trade off between
freedom and control. Moderation can be a slippery slope if it is the
default state. I think the current way of doing things in USENET, where
most groups are unmoderated with a few moderated ones is the right
approach.

I've been mulling over this for a while now, but I think it would really
help entice people if there is something like a "web browser"-esque
interface for USENET. Where you can just open a program and it has an
address bar where you can type the "address" of the heirarchy that want
to go to.

So, for example, instead of typing "facebook.com" you can just type
"alt.fan.usenet" and it will load a rudimentary narkive-like layout that
displays all the recent threads for that newsgroup. That "browser" will
then have a simplified "account creation" menu that they can just go
through to allow them to create a USENET account from either AIOE or
Eternal September.

But if that ever happens, then Eternal September will just repeat itself
as more freedom-loving people who are used to the social media
circlejerk trundle along USENET again.

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