Communications of the ACM
USENET, the OG Social Network, Rises Again Like a Text-Only Phoenix
USENET is older than the Web, and works more like email: servers carry a list of newsgroups, and sync messages with each other.
Credit: Ivacy.com
The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network.
USENET, or NetNews, is a text-only social discussions forum, or rather a set of a great many forums, called "newsgroups," carried by multiple servers around the world.
Although the original developers closed down their instance in 2010, that was just one server out of hundreds, and many are still running just fine.
It never went away—it's still alive, you can get on it for free, and there is a choice of client apps for most OSes to help you navigate.
Although USENET is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network, the Big-8 board is the closest thing it has to a central governing authority.
From The Register
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