From Newsgroup: news.misc
On Tue, 6 Nov 2018, JAB wrote:
On Tue, 6 Nov 2018 07:23:32 -0500, RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com>
wrote:
Given that Usenet 1 (0?) is all but dead,
It's not dead!
Google bought Deja Vu's archives, but at some later point, anyone
could start a new group, which was retained on Google's servers. I accidentally came across some of these groups, which were very
specific, like employment related/etc.
But that's always been the case. There were local hierarchies that had limited distribution (or were set that way but often propagated further), which technically don't count as Usenet. Many an ISP had local newsgroups that didn't propagate out of their system. Both use the same protocol and software, they just don't count as Usenet. It makes sense, the software
was there so why not use it for other things?
But I can remember people wanting to create new groups in the local
hierarchy, never doing much to improve the existing newsgroups and not
talking about their favorite topic in the local general newsgroup.
Usenet had to be topic-driven, because up until sometime in the nineties, tehre were few locations with enough density for discussion to be along
local lines. Maybe at a university, but not much elsewhere. Once
commercial ISPs came along, there was suddenly enough density in most
areas to have local, though defining things by topic had become dominant
by then. So until things built up locally, there wasn't much reason to
create local newsgroups around very specific topics, and in retrospect,
people went elsewhere before the local newsgroups became widely enough
used. They still exist, but nobody used them. I put a lot of time into
the local general newsgroup, and there was too much invasion by
crossposters who better fit into a more Canada wide hierarchy.
Michael
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