An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
I’ve never tried Usenet, but I’ve heard little bits about it here and there. What’s a good way to give it a try?
There are commercial Usenet servers you can access for $5-10 bucks/month. You can find them by google search.
For a Usenet client you can look here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders
you can view pretty much the complete history at groups.google.com. if there any usenet group still active they would show up there as well but it’s a wasteland as far as i can tell. pity, i spent billions of hours on it back in the day.
here’s a group i was active on back in the day, if you can filter it by just stuff from the 1990’s you might have an idea of what it was like to use it. (of course, it was mostly terminal/console based text readers back then, web browsers were new and scary.) https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.synth