The Natural Philosopher writes:

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.

Only if you store everything forever. I've got 356,391 old uk.d-i-y
messages (it sez) dating back several years, which occupy only about
4GB on an 8GB partition.
That could be reduced several times by a good compression algorithm.

(I don't forward, and don't actually need all that guff, but I keep it
for the invaluable nuggets it contains).

So with a couple of 2 TB disks I could if I was interested store and
forward a heck of a lot of different NGs.

You don't have to carry all groups; part of the setup for UUCP is to
specify which groups you will accept from elsewhere, and which forward.
For us it might be mainly uk groups.

And if Usenet is truly 'dying' there won't be a need for much storage,
or fast transfer times, in any case.

Low latency isn't usually important; this reply is to a post dated
5th. April.

I don't know why you're so hot about it. Why does it matter to you?

--
Windmill, Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost