I was more of a usenet type.
You can still get an account at eternal-september.org. There are a few newsgroups that are still active and interesting.
I mean they still existed in the 90’s but were filled with shill ad type of postings. Have the postings gotten better?
Better? No, it’s still unmoderated. So there’s some good stuff and there are twits. It’s the wild west out there.
Could you recommend any non-computer related good newsgroup?
Yeah, that’s an issue. There are still several computing-related groups, but everything else is fading away. The only non-computing one I read is misc.news.internet.discuss. The Vancouver Canucks and Montreal Canadiens newsgroups both seem to have died during the past year. The Canadian football group gets the occasional comment. The old alt hierarchies seem slow or crud-infested. But if you want to follow comp.misc or Seamonkey updates, you’re in luck.
I love to use obsolete technology, things that still perfectly work but are abandoned. But on the internet, these things are generally populated by computer scientists, and it’s a thing I’m not 😅. It’s the same thing on Gopher, Gemini (it’s new but it’s the same ethos), IRC, …
Usenet wuz bitchin’. I remember getting a couple of layers deep in the rock heirarchy (was it rock.history.50s-60s? ) and some great discussions, fact- and story- trading with peeps who went deep. Feedback was NOT instant, and so patience and quality were rewarded.
Then those brats with their binaries came along and bye-bye.
the pets ones were great to. I went back in the late 90’s and you can see writeups that were very obviously shills for like particular brands of petfood. That is when I knew I could never return!
It was already starting to predict what Web 2.0 would become!
I tended to use moos, muds and mushes more than IRC. The servers crashed, but you never had to worry about netsplits.
ooh. I remember a star trek one that was really neat.
All IRC really needs to be brought into the modern world is voice and video chat. I mean, those are the reasons everyone I knew ditched IRC back in the day for shit like Skype and TeamSpeak. It never really needed improvement for the text part. Maybe allowing images to be embedded? Everything else about IRC was, and still is, peak.
Discord circa 2018 was pretty much everything I’d want in a modern IRC.
If they can just bring that set of features, I’d switch back to IRC in a heartbeat.
Oldschool Discord really was modern IRC. The creeping enshittification of it over the last 5-6 years has been sad to witness.
Be the change you want to see in the world
I used IRC a fre years ago. It’s “active” but mostly small groups of close friends.
Honestly, I really wish we had an open source version of discord, discord just works. Revolt sounds promising, but I couldn’t get the email verification to send on either Yahoo, Gmail, or Proton email. So trying to convince my friends to switch if something that basic doesn’t would be a hard sell.
Signal works pretty well.
It doesn’t have all the features of Discord, but I also think Discord has too many features used for things that it shouldn’t do.
I just downloaded Revolt on Android and the verification email worked fine with my proton account. Might’ve just been a temporary outage when you tried it.
