# Usenet

My earliest memories of using the internet date to around the mid
90's. Back then I was on dial-up, like the majority of people who had
any personal internet access.

The multitude of giant internet and social media companies were in
their infancy and if you wanted to communicate with people regarding
some subject, you would either do it through IRC or Usenet news
groups.


## 90's Dial-up era 

In the dial-up era, every ISP used to provide news servers along with
email servers for their customers. There were newsgroups on
practically every subject and they were very active. I got my first
IT job through a posting on a newsgroup, I also bought and aquired
computers and other hardware through them. Then Yahoo auctions and
shortly after Ebay came to the fore as places to buy and sell.
Myspace became a thing and everyone started making a personal
website...

I don't really know how or why, but newsgroups dropped off my radar 
entirely as everything seemed to be made accessible via the WWW. 


## Escaping 2020's WWW monoculture 

Today everything is provided via the WWW or some app, everything has
converged to that advert, popup, javascript infested mess and mass of
sponsored content designed to keep you engaged and feeding your data
back to the mega-corporations.

In the beginning there were numerous competing and complementary
protocols.  NNTP (network news transfer protocol), gopher, WAIS,
HTTP, FTP, finger, telnet, SMTP, POP, IMAP... Few are those who
actually use them natively any more.

I had already decided I wanted out. I was already partly out due to
my adoption of RSS, gopher and return to IRC, but there had to be a
way of further removing myself. What was it that I did before the
boom of the WWW? Newsgroups, that's where I used to engage with
people on things that I was interested in, or when I needed to know
something that I couldn't find an answer to... 


## Usenet - I'm BACK! 

Firstly no ISP's today seem to provide news servers. If you do manage
to find a free provider, they are few and far between and will
probably not offer the binary groups as this requires so much more
storage and bandwidth. www.eternal-september.org are one of the few
remaining free usenet access providers. Kudos to them for providing 
free accounts for people to access this resource.

After registering for an account I looked for a CLI application to
subscribe to and read the groups. slrn is a common one I believe, but
on initial usage I couldn't get to grips with it. I ended up
installing tin, which somehow seemed more intuitive. I managed to
subscribe to a few groups, some that I remember from years past and a
few new ones that more reflect my current interests.

I decided to send a message to eternal-september.test, to make sure
everything was as it should be, entitled 'Usenet - I'm BACK!'. To my
great surprise I got replies! I had the feeling of stumbling into
some hermitage where the inhabitants were only too happy to have
visitors! My initial happiness unfortunately was all too quickly
replaced by a feeling of melancholy at the dates of some of the last
posts. Some were years previous, others had maybe one or two posts,
that weren't spam, within the last 12 months. I found myself replying
to old posts or posts I normally wouldn't just to generate a bit of
traffic and let people know there were others still out there too.

Usenet was a great resource and can be again. Get yourselves a free
account[1] and reclaim it before it is lost forever.

[1](gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn/c/newsgroups.gph)