I keep thinking how much more logical #usenet would be if someone actually had created local hierarchies like they exist for a few places. there's a france. hierarchy which has groups for all kinds of places in the country.
instead some places, esp. in Germany have hierarchies for themselves (like nbg. or bln.) while Austria has at. and oesterreich., UK has both uk. and england. etc.
but barely anyone is using these by now anyway, so it's a moot point.
it's of course a problem with a network that has grown organically like usenet has. It's not like technically anything but the Big Eight newsgroups are even part of proper #usenet. Even the incredibly popular alt. hierarchy technically is just an offshoot (and is mostly so popular because that's where the pirated stuff can be found on servers that allow it)
I think the sheer amount of groups usenet has is both a boon and a hindrance. on the one hand you can get a group for everything. on the other nobody is gonna read it, or even carry it.
the whole system suffers from this because it sprawled out in the '80s and '90s, and some of the topics just are not as relevant anymore.
who is actually using #os2 nowadays for example?
and yet the comp.os.os2 hierarchy has more groups than the comp.os.linux one.
and it's not really easy to create new relevant newsgroups (because for that you would have to show they'd be used), but as long as there are no newsgroups for certain topics, who is going to use it?
ok, ok, there's the free. hierarchy where everyone can make a newsgroup. but seriously, when was the last time anyone posted in one of those?
the whole process is kind of a death spiral though. people don't post in groups because there's no groups for specific topics, but because nobody is posting no new groups are being created.
not that it means that much. The group creation is mostly for the official usenet hierarchies. It's easy enough to follow groups that shouldn't exist anymore because people don't bother getting rid of them.
both rec.games.frp.industry and .storyteller don't technically exist anymore, and yet I receive them
this is of course caused by all that stuff having spread out from certain servers. There is nothing that keeps me from setting up my own server and creating my own local hierarchy, which might or might not get picked up by other servers with time
(news.eternal-september.org for sure also carries local hierarchies for other servers, e.g. rocksolid or the defunct aioe, I guess by now it's rather trivial to carry more groups if you just do text feeds)
I do remember my university had a #news server when I was a student there, but I think they switched off everything years ago.
quite a few hierarchies are just that: local #university systems that now lay orphaned, or are running on some long forgotten system somewhere in the basement).
and university basements can be large and full of wonders. I remember encountering a room once where my student union kept the books for the annual booksale, all surrounded by medieval brickwork in the basement
@Longplay_Games they most likely did, I am fascinated with the idea of this network that was not actually part of the #www but still managed to transmit data all over the planet.
but a lot of this stuff is just gone.
@kyonshi Very much so.
I felt a deep and personal sense of loss when MELVYL was powered down. It was the authoritative card catalog for my university life, and I continued to use it looong after because I often visited university libraries for reference and general reading.
@Longplay_Games card catalogues I only touched on briefly when I was in university.
I got TAUGHT how to use it at the beginning of my studies, but soon enough everything was switched to the computer catalogue, and over time the card catalogue disappeared somewhere.
I only ever actually used a card catalogue when I was researching some stuff in my wife's university in Poland. But even that one has been replaced by now.
@kyonshi MELVYL was a computerized mainframe based digital card catalog, to my understanding one of the first (and one of the last around).
It was amazing, and it had every single book in the entire UC system in it, so you could effectively find so many details about books, order them for loan, etc. Over 30 million records.
which explains why a ton of free or dead cheap usenet servers are situated in Germany.
The only reason to actually pay for usenet by now is if you want to download illegal stuff; the storage space needed for that is so massive that only an actual company can actually afford it.
of course these companies carry the text feeds mostly because it doesn't matter with the rest of the data, and some people never even realize that #usenet actually is a #forum and not some file-share #piracy site
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