this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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So Usenet was the first fedi site? Reassuring that the concept predates the current paradigm and still has legs, however niche it is atm.
Sort of. It predated the web, so calling it a "site" is wrong. Just like you can have an email application that's completely separate from your web browser, you can have a Usenet client that's also its own thing. Of course, people made web-based clients as time went on.
Your ISP ran a Usenet server that connected to other Usenet servers. The biggest problem with this system was that your ISP would automatically delete posts past a certain age. Following old threads was a pain.
Google Groups started as a Usenet archive where messages were kept forever. Google bought them and turned it into what it is now.
I mean, sort of? It was decentralized because that was just the nature of the early net, rather than a conscious choice to avoid governments and corporations censoring you. They simply didn't have anything like the net we have today.
That’s fair. I forgot briefly that fediverse has that political side lol but meant more the technology of “broadcasting” and inter-site communications. Seems a better comparison than email at least.
Yeah, Usenet was structured that way more for practical reasons than political ones. Local users were truly local, as in you usually connected to a server that was geographically close to you. Often it was on the same university campus you were on. The long-distance connections between servers didn't have the bandwidth for everyone to just be freely hopping around browsing whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, at least not at first, so mirroring the content was a better approach. It also made things much more reliable, the servers didn't need 100% uptime.
Usenet was a lot more "trusting" in its structure. The newsgroups didn't have moderators per se, and they weren't hosted by specific instances; they were more just a "tag" you could add to a post to let people filter which subjects they were interested in seeing. There was a globally agreed upon list of newsgroups and a distributed system for creating new ones, but it was all pretty informal. Wouldn't work well in the current Internet, it'd get spammed to death in seconds. But on the surface level it really felt a lot like the modern Fediverse does, with subject-specific groups and threaded discussions and such.
Userboards, newsgroups, irc chat
That's why almost no ISP is offering it anymore. No one made money from it, so dump it, maybe try to squeeze some cash out of those hwo really want it but better just drop it.
No, it was every service replicating all posts in groups it served.
Like FTP mirrors of FOSS software, there are plenty of mirrors of Debian, for example. Except far bigger traffic.