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6 mo. ago

  • Wide range of powerful, mature clients with extensive filtering functionality, offline reading support.

    Sadly this isn't really the case anymore. All the to previously used clients (other than command line) for most major platforms have been dead for over a decade now due to the drop in usage of USENET during the 2000s. With that as well there never were any actual mobile clients that were developed (as a side note).

    Better client-side accessibility. I mean, you can be blind and use a screenreader or something on Usenet. Going to be a lot less ideal on the Threadiverse.

    I think this has a lot to deal with just the tech stack required to run the modern Threadiverse. I honestly liked the simple and low-level aspects of USENET vs HTTP based alternatives. USENET was defined by objectively shorter standards than what current HTTP and Web technologies define. It also meant a larger selection of clients (and the possibility to create your own) due to the greater simplicity of standards required for it to function.

    Since it was also was built as function over form vs the Web's reciprocal approach it makes implementations like screen readers much more difficult unless the developers specifically include that into their Threadiverse software

    Comment editors are probably better than the in-browser textarea editors or clients with limited text-editors that I’ve seen (though the Threadiverse has Markdown as a standard, which I think is generally preferable).

    Markdown is nice I just find it hard to read sometimes due to it kinda being like a web page within a web page. Or better put it's more like if you took a physical scroll of simple comments (no headers, no nothing, just text) and then pasted (physically) a fully formatted document as if it were just another comment ignoring any kind of page start or end. It just feels odd to look at. I hope that all made sense.

    Though I haven’t been browsing Usenet in some time, and maybe they have MIME-encoded Markdown or HTML or something as a common thing now.

    There is the option to include HTML in messages but I think that is generally considered bad form just due to the nature of embedding images into articles rather than having them as some kind of message attachment is not really in the spirit of the minimal nature of USENET.

    More-standardized support for posting embedded binaries.

    Maybe uuencode and base32/64 as yEnc wasn't really a proper standard and more so defacto which lead to some clients that decided to not implement it at all (MS, Mozilla; along with other mail client news readers)

    Commercial service is available. It’s great that people donate their time and funds to make Threadiverse servers run, but there’s something to be said for the resources available from commercial service. There’s nothing stopping someone from running a commercial Threadiverse instance, but AFAIK, nobody presently is doing so.

    The only real reason why the commercial service because a real big thing for USENET and pretty much the exclusive way to access it was because of the large amount of binary newsgroups, which in my opinion really destroyed USENET since it cause mass desertion of the system, including the horrible amount of spam.

    As for a threadiverse instance it probably is best that it remain non-commercialized, or if it were to become so it wouldn't have as much an impact because the risk of storing gigantic binaries with little moderation is minimized.

    Newsgroups are more discoverable than are communities on the Threadiverse — you really need to use the https://lemmyverse.net/ index to find any communities out there, as otherwise you’ll only see it once the exact name “!community@instancename” has been searched for on your local instance. Usenet (mostly) propagated newsgroups everywhere.

    This is one of my biggest gripes I have with lemmy and the rest of the threadiverse. For me to discover new communities to subscribe to on a separate federated instance I have to navigate directly to said instance via the url bar of my browser and search them manually rather than be able to search for them from my instance. If they had some kind of community distribution function then it would be much simpler to find niche communities.

    If this point isn't addressed eventually it might end up actually inadvertently contributing to the centralization of communities where everyone peers to lemmy.world for example just to get all the communities rather than seeing existing communities on other instances.

    Probably a larger userbase, though I haven’t dug up current numbers. Certainly a different group and set of interests.

    Its mostly graybeards and a lot of binary uploads. There are still quite a few active newsgroups though, you just have to look through the endless onslaught of past uploads in supposedly 'text only' newsgroups that have been overrun by binaries.

    Really the only good provider that you can use to get the classic experience is eternal September (which is free btw)

    I would bet that Usenet servers can scale up to more load than can Threadiverse servers.

    This could be argued by saying that there wouldn't be a need to use web tech to service all the requests sure, but I honestly don't think that the scalability would be much different. Though, I am not in a position to provide actually insightful commentary on this specific subject.

  • I also prefer the text based nature of USENET, it was simpler and honestly easier to create whole fleshed out ideas. Your article had a nice stage and a spotlight all to its own in each message pane, meanwhile the modern forums have you view the text within surrounding comments or text. I just think it makes it less intimate than it was before. Though, easier to scroll through

  • I would say that I liked the simpler technology stack that it used to communicate, even working over high-latency high-throughput transfer links (i.e. Tape drives over 747s back in the day). Though that is specifically UUCP related rather than USENET as a whole.

  • There is perhaps a balance. I recently watched a video about the R4 DS card that allowed for an immense amount of piracy that killed off a shit ton of studios in the process. So maybe a time delay is probably best rather than forever paywall something.

    The majority of people who would purchase the product wouldn't really wait. Only after a certain period after release does it make sense to make it public and not require people to pirate. Then again I would imagine that only works with large/popular releases, not so much the smaller creators who would want to make any kind of money they could regardless of the timescale (which is the majority of whom I think the OP is talking about)

  • This is true, but it really is left up to the author because sometimes the writing of the material itself could take a multitude of years. Why do you think AI companies want to steal all of it rather than support those who actually create? It's hard to make and takes a long time.

  • money, duh...

  • Minecraft with Leslie nielsen would be rather funny. Just an idea ripe for comedy I would think

  • I just think that is a bad idea because ActivityPub is a peering protocol. That means just a lot of traffic. If we have bots posting then that is just a lot of wasted storage space and network bandwidth to do not a whole lot. Moderation bots is a HARD maybe. Topic/comment (1 way) bridges would be cool from reddit and other sources but I doubt that would work out too well since it would probably get blocked by reddit somehow.

    Overall, no bots plz

  • I would also be afraid of this. How valid are the results of the LLMs? I sure there must be quite a few AI found exploits but the severity or legitimacy of all the returned AI evaluations and fixes can't possibly have a uniform quality.

  • This seems like an over generalization and less likely than the uneducated hivemind of morons actually being in favor of AI

  • You know, compiler based AI (not just LLMs) seem like an idea that might be pretty interesting. The option to disable or completely omit them from the toolchain would be mandatory however. But, even then we would have to consider how many pieces of software that then rely on this proverbial black box built into compilers would then get integrated into critical supply chain? We soon would have to start running behavior based "background checks" (just an analogy) on our software much like we do with people due to the unpredictability of such complexity.

    Side note, I can't wait to see just how complex the field of game theory gets with AI. I would love to see any video essays on the topic if they do exist already.

    🧐

  • I am just really happy that he is still around to actually oversee the mixing between such an important part of computing infrastructure and the new radical tool of AI. Had it been 10 years later and we probably would have uber slop linux

  • Yeah, it was a dumb question lol.

  • Literally, what is this even for?

  • Considering that fact that you used the incorrect "Maine" hurts my soul

  • that's actually pretty cool

  • I think this could be updated by a single person for multiple developing situations up to 10 at a single time (which is unlikely for mass reports imo, I have no basis for this assumption however). Rather than needing an AI agent to update automatically

  • Any Austin!! Dang, I just watched his video about GTA SA. Good pick!

  • Yubikeys

  • SomeOrdinaryGAmers. I find his switch to awareness about current issues regarding privacy is really good. It's easy to get lost in our busy lives.

    I would also say that Clabretro and Cathode Ray Dude are really cool. Been watching them for years at this point.