@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Off-topic areas are always a good idea. :-) Web forums often had those. And web forums are actually what I had in mind, @bender@twtxt.net. 😅 (While I do have a certain nostalgia for it now, Usenet has always been a bit weird to me. Can’t really explain why.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de “topic-based forums/groups”, you mean what USENET used to be, and the “niche” that Reddit is fulfilling these days? :-D I get it, I agree. I think I find twtxt more fulfilling than anything else because of its small size. I feel like I truly know everyone (even if that might not be true), and find myself “at home”. The bigger the place, the shyest I become, the less enticing it is.

@prologic@twtxt.net In all seriousness: Don’t worry, I’m not going to host some Fediverse thingy at the moment, probably never will. 😅

But I do use it quite a lot. Although, I don’t really use it as a social network (as in: following people). I follow some tags like #retrocomputing, which fills my timeline with interesting content. If there was a traditional web forum or mailing list or even a usenet group that covered this topic, I’d use that instead. But that’s all (mostly) dead by now. ☹️

First we got 9fans to be moderated, now we’ve brought back comp.os.plan9! Come say hi! #plan9 #usenet

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network.

The USENET Cookbook: One of the earliest digital publications
Long before HTML or PDF… we had Emacs, plain text, and USENET. And it was glorious. ⌘ Read more

I’ve been running some internal usenet groups for a while, now I’m starting to make more use of them and slap them on the web - https://omg.singles/T7ggI

as the person who motivated CompuServe’s USENET gateway https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-10-07-9410070309-story.html I’ve see what happens when the unwashed masses are turned loose in techie playgrounds

So, I’m working on a fediverse client based on https://web.archive.org/web/20190101185657/https://jfm.carcosa.net/blog/computing/usenet/ ; it’s here: https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/fern . It is currently read-only, but it has read history.

Usenet History: How Binaries Took Over Newsgroups https://tedium.co/2017/10/03/usenet-binaries-history/

lainspotting: Robert Anton Wilson on Usenet (1995-2003) http://www.lainspotting.com/2017/07/robert-anton-wilson-on-usenet-1995-2003.html