Looking for New Usenet News Provider


Usenet News
Posted on September 3, 2021

The Usenet News service I have been using to provide news for our shell servers seems to have gone TU without warning. They sent me no notice but just disappeared from the Web. They were a US based firm but the domain name is now owned by an outfit in England. There is no website, phone numbers disconnected, no e-mail addresses working, no way to find out what happened.

I am looking for a new provider but in the meantime I apologize but no Usenet News available until and unless I can find a replacement.

If anyone knows of a potential replacement please contact support@eskimo.com or via the Fediverse nanook@friendica.eskimo.com.

in reply to Nanook

@Fritz-Ferdinand von Pinguin Uhm....... Why can't you just connect to discord with your normal browser? or telegram? or IRC, or why don't you connect your mailserver with your normal browser?

Usenet is basically lot's of what the internet in the early days was. And even more. Usenet did allow you to communicate with other peoples in so called groups (nowadays we call them forum boards;)), and in contrast to nowadays forums where you all are on a island, usenet was a globally connected network of message boards and threads where you had lots of options to connect and get your own feed.

As example, for transfers between systems which where not 24/7 connected (remember, internet wasn't everywhere back then), there was a dedicated data protocol called UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy) which used standard modem dialups to transfer messages and sometimes even files over some distances and even across several "hops" aka servers. (That's why it's still called 'hops' in traceroute. ;))

So...

Why browsers never evolved to include a good NNTP (again another later usenet protocol) reader.. well it wasn't their part. It would have made way more sense to get included into a mail program. But they had their very own development anyways and there already existed very good uucp/fido clients back then...

Overall, UUCP is often said to be dead .. but those who said to be dead are living longer than anyone else.. ;)

Unknown parent

@Fritz-Ferdinand von Pinguin Mostly because the volume of traffic is huge and so it needs significant investment to handle a full feed. It is a store and forward network, common in the days when dial up connectivity was the norm. Only back then it was mainly used for short text messages, now idiots post entire movies to it.
Unknown parent

@Fritz-Ferdinand von Pinguin Yes it is the sheer volume that makes it expensive. I had a 56k satellite link feeding me, it was inadequate, now a 100mb/s internet link is inadequate which is why I've taken to outsourcing it. You really need to be at one of the CIX locations so you have free bandwidth in order to make it economical.

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