It's funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won't catch on because "federation is too hard to understand" when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

unmoderated

Fun fact: that's not strictly true.

You could have moderated groups, where a moderator/group of moderators would get sent every post via email, and they'd only be posted into the group if approved.

The vast, vast, vast majority of groups were not moderated, but that's not to say you couldn't do so.

[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Yes pardon me I left off the word "largely" before "unmoderated." We all knew it was possible, but it didn't matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

We all knew it was possible

I wouldn't bet on that, which is why I mentioned moderated groups at all. As you said, they're rare and even if you used usenet 20 or 25 or 30 years ago, the odds that you'd have ever seen one was shockingly low.

So even ex-usenet users might not have a clue that there was a method for doing that (let alone any of the people who aren't that old), which is why I brought it up.

[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn't proposed with moderation then it couldn't be moderated, so most of them weren't. It's pretty wild that they didn't understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you'd have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over... it was like 2002, 2003? I've never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don't get me started on the web's lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.