On 05/04/13 11:12, John Williamson wrote:
On 05/04/2013 10:55, Huge wrote:
On 2013-04-05, polygonum wrote:
On 05/04/2013 08:41, Huge wrote:
I agree, but Usenet is dying.

(


Not for another year - paid my Berlin sub the other day. :-)

Well, me too. I like Usenet, for all kinds of reasons, but someone
showed me a depressing graph of traffic analysis for the uk.* groups
(I wish I could find it again! Ah, here we go ...)

http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/spoolstats/

Is there some way we could make Usenet more popular? (Not "Facebook"
popular, but if we could get some new blood in - I suspect most Usenet
users are getting on...) Hmm; Someone's just claimed the first post made
on a Raspberry Pi.

(* Likely before that - if volumes fall too far, the existing providers
will drop out. Still, we could carry on as a hobbyist "service", I
suppose.)


How much of the 50% reduction in message numbers and bytes used on the
greenend.org graph is due to people not using the binary groups to share
files with the rise of facebook and other sharing services such as
soundcloud and Flickr?

It's also only showing figures since 2010, so what happened before that?

Advantages of text only usenet are that it's cheap to operate, in
storage, processing and bandwidth.

You have obviously never run a news server.

Its MASSiVELY STUPENDOUSLY expensive to provide storage,.. Even for
text only.

Or it was back in the day. Multiple copies of every single message ever
written, or even the last 6 weeks or so, mean storage is replicated for
the entire usenet traffic right across the internet, and back in the day
of modems and UUCP, beyond as well.

All one could say was that it was a best efforts way of propagating text
messages across an unreliable and intermittent network of peer to peer
machines. The ONLY thing it was good at was bandwidth.

Even that wasn't great. Again back in the day running a full text only
server was chewing 30% of total bandwidth he had. Today of course with
streaming videos its barely noticeable.


It's also resilient, and has been
known to work when other means of communication were cut off either by
government action or physical problems. IIRC, the first eyewitness
reports of 9/11 came out on newsgroups, though some cellphone calls nay
have beaten them.

It also works well over a slow connection.


those are its advantages.

But they are the only ones.


--
Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc-ra-cy) €“ a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.