@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Off-topic areas are always a good idea. :-) Web forums often had those. And web forums are actually what I had in mind, @bender@twtxt.net. 😅 (While I do have a certain nostalgia for it now, Usenet has always been a bit weird to me. Can’t really explain why.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de “topic-based forums/groups”, you mean what USENET used to be, and the “niche” that Reddit is fulfilling these days? :-D I get it, I agree. I think I find twtxt more fulfilling than anything else because of its small size. I feel like I truly know everyone (even if that might not be true), and find myself “at home”. The bigger the place, the shyest I become, the less enticing it is.

@prologic@twtxt.net In all seriousness: Don’t worry, I’m not going to host some Fediverse thingy at the moment, probably never will. 😅

But I do use it quite a lot. Although, I don’t really use it as a social network (as in: following people). I follow some tags like #retrocomputing, which fills my timeline with interesting content. If there was a traditional web forum or mailing list or even a usenet group that covered this topic, I’d use that instead. But that’s all (mostly) dead by now. ☹️

First we got 9fans to be moderated, now we’ve brought back comp.os.plan9! Come say hi! #plan9 #usenet

You might have seen me popping up on IRC. This is how it looks:

https://movq.de/v/3a4f9833f3/

That’s EZirc from the 1990ies. (It says it needs Warp 4, but runs fine on Warp 3.)

Lots of this old stuff still works (technically), but as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org said: A lot of it really is dead. There’s not much going on anymore in Usenet.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network.

Hoy entre a Usenet (con Thunderbird) y fue algo extraño.
Un montón de spam en alt. Y foros abandonados en 2017, que a su vez ya habían sido abandonados en 2012. Es como entrar a un pueblo abandonado donde alguna vez existió gente.

Hoy entre a Usenet (con Thunderbird) y fue algo extraño.
Un montón de spam en alt. Y foros abandonados en 2017, que a su vez ya habían sido abandonados en 2012. Es como entrar a un pueblo abandonado donde alguna vez existió gente.

@xuu@txt.sour.is @prologic@twtxt.net Yarn.social without threading (as it would be the case in a “truncated” feed) does not make sense to me.

Put another way: Yarn.social is not twtxt. The content that we all have in our feeds really is much closer to a web forum or usenet or whatever. It’s threaded conversations. twtxt, as I believe it was originally intended, are short little status updates – that’s it. The formats of Yarn.social and twtxt might be very similar, but the content is vastly different and, in a way, incompatible. (As such, I think I understand very well that the original twtxt crowd is disgruntled.)

That proposed truncated feed doesn’t really provide any value, if you ask me. 🤔 It’d just be chaotic.