[Followup-To: comp.misc]

Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:

> > Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
> > any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>
> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.

There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
for immediate comfort.
____________________
1. Genesis 25, 25-34.

--
() ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments

On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:

> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>
> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>
>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>
>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>
> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
> for immediate comfort.
> ____________________
> 1. Genesis 25, 25-34.
>
>

It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
hoops to jump through.

But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
islands eventually?

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>
>> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>>
>> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>>
>>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>>
>>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>>
>> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
>> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
>> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
>> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
>> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
>> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
>> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
>> for immediate comfort.
>> ____________________
>> 1. Genesis 25, 25-34.

Cool. The phenomenon is pretty old.

> It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
> their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
> evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
> hoops to jump through.

I'm from a time that taking the hard paths was more exciting than the
easy ones. But, yeah, things change.

> But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
> islands eventually?

There's always a movement and their period of stability has been
decreasing. When a movement is not a healthy one, its period is surely
short. But we have no guarantee that the next one will be brighter.

On 7/24/24 2:08 AM, D wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>
>> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>>
>> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>>
>>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>>
>>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>>
>> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
>> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
>> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
>> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
>> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
>> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
>> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
>> for immediate comfort.
>
> It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
> their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
> evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
> hoops to jump through.
>
> But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
> islands eventually?

How would that work? The aforementioned young are too stupid to realize
how trapped they are and/or too ignorant to do anything about it if they
DO figure it out. The rest of us are just too damn tired :-(

--
Cheers, Bev (Registered Linux User 85683)
Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really
embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen
an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a
lot more careful about what they say if they had. -- Linus Torvalds

On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, The Real Bev wrote:

> On 7/24/24 2:08 AM, D wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>>
>>> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>>>
>>> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>>>
>>>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>>>
>>>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>>>
>>> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
>>> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
>>> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
>>> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
>>> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
>>> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
>>> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
>>> for immediate comfort.
>>
>> It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
>> their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
>> evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
>> hoops to jump through.
>>
>> But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
>> islands eventually?
>
> How would that work? The aforementioned young are too stupid to realize how
> trapped they are and/or too ignorant to do anything about it if they DO
> figure it out. The rest of us are just too damn tired :-(
>

A slow building up over time? Even if the majority is too stupid, perhaps
there are a few who do see the light?

Another way might be some big event or disaster, but given the reaction to
cambridge analytic, and countless other privacy leaks and manipulation
attemps, I do doubt it.

When it comes to being tired, there comes a time in everyones lives when
it is time to hand over to the next generation. You did your part, and
that is fine, so you can rest content with that fact.

On Wed, 24 Jul 2024 11:58:28 +0300, Anton Shepelev wrote:

> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet, Mailing
> lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist corporate-owned cenusured
> commercial "products" that are huge, bloated, tasteless, and require
> up-to-date hardware, OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of
> the story of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
> for immediate comfort.
> ____________________
> 1. Genesis 25, 25-34.

You may try to make them use more modern open solutions like Mastodon,
Matrix, XMPP. Usenet et al. are just too antiquated.
Even Gajim (XMPP client) now tries to look like Skype or Discord or
something.

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, The Real Bev wrote:
>
>> On 7/24/24 2:08 AM, D wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>>>
>>>> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>>>>
>>>> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>>>>
>>>>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>>>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>>>>
>>>> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
>>>> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
>>>> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
>>>> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
>>>> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
>>>> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
>>>> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
>>>> for immediate comfort.
>>>
>>> It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
>>> their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
>>> evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
>>> hoops to jump through.
>>>
>>> But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
>>> islands eventually?
>>
>> How would that work? The aforementioned young are too stupid to realize how
>> trapped they are and/or too ignorant to do anything about it if they DO
>> figure it out. The rest of us are just too damn tired :-(
>>
>
> A slow building up over time? Even if the majority is too stupid, perhaps
> there are a few who do see the light?

This is how it almost always happens (i.e., anyone remember 'myspace'
from years ago)? And I've seen news articles that imply the shift is
already well underway for facebook. Apparently the "young crowd" (as
in the 20somethings and below) are all on Instagram because "facebook
is for old people" (i.e., their parents, aunts, uncles, etc. are on
facebook).

Sadly, the young crowd is just trading one corporate devil for another
equally bad corporate devil.

On 25.07.2024 um 11:49 Uhr George Musk wrote:

> You may try to make them use more modern open solutions like Mastodon,

I've tried out mastodon and I don't like it. Only usable for chit-chat,
you can't open a "thread" in a new tab by middle click, so rather
uncomfortable to use.
The content is also mostly non-interesting, like Twitter. Some people
who hate Elon Musk now moved to mastodon and post their bullshit there.

--
kind regards
Marco

Send spam to 1721900975muell@cartoonies.org

Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> writes:

> I've tried out mastodon and I don't like it. Only usable for chit-chat,
> you can't open a "thread" in a new tab by middle click, so rather
> uncomfortable to use.
> The content is also mostly non-interesting, like Twitter. Some people
> who hate Elon Musk now moved to mastodon and post their bullshit there.

I only can halfway bear Mastodon by ignoring the global timelines and
only focus on the local one of my preferred instance (emacs.ch), but
despite that I still need a break sometimes ('m in one right now).

A federation of nodes of not identical feature-sets has to fail. Not
all of them support multiple markup variants, the diversity of the
maximum message length of the nodes is very diverse (IIRC from 500 chars
to some huge value) and not all nodes can use hashtags and the lack of
properly isolated groups increases that mess exponentially.

New Fedistan is just a federated mess.

Lets be happy about this: I already saw some New Fedistan inhabitants
join the Original Fediverse. Not only for Usenet, but for Feedbase,
Gmane, Gwene too.

--
1. Hitchhiker 5: (101) "You just come along with me and have a good
time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your
ear."

Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> writes:

> On 25.07.2024 um 11:49 Uhr George Musk wrote:
>
>> You may try to make them use more modern open solutions like Mastodon,
>
> I've tried out mastodon and I don't like it. Only usable for chit-chat,
> you can't open a "thread" in a new tab by middle click, so rather
> uncomfortable to use.
> The content is also mostly non-interesting, like Twitter. Some people
> who hate Elon Musk now moved to mastodon and post their bullshit there.

That's what most people don't realize: most of these chat systems are no
good for conversation. People don't realize this because they also
can't really tell a good conversation from chit-chat. That's because a
good conversation requires thinking, but most people can't tell thinking
from brain activity. In other words, the underlying phenomenon is more
worrying. We've reduced thinking quality in the large.

USENET is antiquated in some sense, but it's still the system where
people can write calmly with no distractions. Therefore USENET is still
the most adequate because there is no other system with these most
important features. As I'm writing this paragraph, there is nothing
flashing on my screen and nobody is waiting for me, so I can take all
the time I want. And that increases the quality of the conversation.

Here's an example. Most USENET clients maximize your writing screen.
Compare that with Whatsapp or Discord. You write your message in a
small region of the program, clearly implying that your writing is not
important. What about all the flashing stuff? These programs all look
like a Christmas tree. If you read writers blogs, you will notice
sometimes they write about their tools and they talk about pens, paper,
computers and text editors. The same applies to programmers and other
technical people such as scientists. They all talk about not getting
distracted with nonsense.

Good conversation is sort of the same. If you start an oral
conversation with someone and, say, the person goes off on some tangent
all the time, that conversation doesn't get very deep. (For most
people, perhaps, that's no problem because they don't even know what
depth is.) Getting off on tangents is not so bad on USENET because we
can easily backtrack a thread, say. Conversation in writing is
different from oral conversation. But the point is that not getting
distracted is important in conversation or anything else that requires
thinking.

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024, Rich wrote:

> D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, The Real Bev wrote:
>>
>>> On 7/24/24 2:08 AM, D wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>>>>>
>>>>> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>>>>>
>>>>>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>>>>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
>>>>> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
>>>>> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
>>>>> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
>>>>> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
>>>>> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
>>>>> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
>>>>> for immediate comfort.
>>>>
>>>> It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
>>>> their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
>>>> evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
>>>> hoops to jump through.
>>>>
>>>> But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
>>>> islands eventually?
>>>
>>> How would that work? The aforementioned young are too stupid to realize how
>>> trapped they are and/or too ignorant to do anything about it if they DO
>>> figure it out. The rest of us are just too damn tired :-(
>>>
>>
>> A slow building up over time? Even if the majority is too stupid, perhaps
>> there are a few who do see the light?
>
> This is how it almost always happens (i.e., anyone remember 'myspace'
> from years ago)? And I've seen news articles that imply the shift is
> already well underway for facebook. Apparently the "young crowd" (as
> in the 20somethings and below) are all on Instagram because "facebook
> is for old people" (i.e., their parents, aunts, uncles, etc. are on
> facebook).
>
> Sadly, the young crowd is just trading one corporate devil for another
> equally bad corporate devil.
>

Rubbish! When I'm out in bars and night clubs, I get loads of women by
telling them I'm a regular usenet user!

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024, yeti wrote:

> Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> writes:
>
>> I've tried out mastodon and I don't like it. Only usable for chit-chat,
>> you can't open a "thread" in a new tab by middle click, so rather
>> uncomfortable to use.
>> The content is also mostly non-interesting, like Twitter. Some people
>> who hate Elon Musk now moved to mastodon and post their bullshit there.
>
> I only can halfway bear Mastodon by ignoring the global timelines and
> only focus on the local one of my preferred instance (emacs.ch), but
> despite that I still need a break sometimes ('m in one right now).

I do the same thing. Mastodon, only useful for trivial things and lighter
memes, but definitely not for long form or deep discussions. For those, I
turn to email, mailinglists or usenet depending on the person and topic.

Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> wrote:
> On 25.07.2024 um 11:49 Uhr George Musk wrote:
>
>> You may try to make them use more modern open solutions like
>> Mastodon,
>
> I've tried out mastodon and I don't like it. Only usable for
> chit-chat, you can't open a "thread" in a new tab by middle click,
> ...

Any web dev that breaks middle click to open a link in a new tab should
never be allowed to work on any web projects ever again.

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024, Johanne Fairchild wrote:

> Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> writes:
>
>> On 25.07.2024 um 11:49 Uhr George Musk wrote:
>>
>>> You may try to make them use more modern open solutions like Mastodon,
>>
>> I've tried out mastodon and I don't like it. Only usable for chit-chat,
>> you can't open a "thread" in a new tab by middle click, so rather
>> uncomfortable to use.
>> The content is also mostly non-interesting, like Twitter. Some people
>> who hate Elon Musk now moved to mastodon and post their bullshit there.
>
> That's what most people don't realize: most of these chat systems are no
> good for conversation. People don't realize this because they also
> can't really tell a good conversation from chit-chat. That's because a
> good conversation requires thinking, but most people can't tell thinking
> from brain activity. In other words, the underlying phenomenon is more
> worrying. We've reduced thinking quality in the large.
>
> USENET is antiquated in some sense, but it's still the system where
> people can write calmly with no distractions. Therefore USENET is still
> the most adequate because there is no other system with these most
> important features. As I'm writing this paragraph, there is nothing
> flashing on my screen and nobody is waiting for me, so I can take all
> the time I want. And that increases the quality of the conversation.
>
> Here's an example. Most USENET clients maximize your writing screen.
> Compare that with Whatsapp or Discord. You write your message in a
> small region of the program, clearly implying that your writing is not
> important. What about all the flashing stuff? These programs all look
> like a Christmas tree. If you read writers blogs, you will notice
> sometimes they write about their tools and they talk about pens, paper,
> computers and text editors. The same applies to programmers and other
> technical people such as scientists. They all talk about not getting
> distracted with nonsense.
>
> Good conversation is sort of the same. If you start an oral
> conversation with someone and, say, the person goes off on some tangent
> all the time, that conversation doesn't get very deep. (For most
> people, perhaps, that's no problem because they don't even know what
> depth is.) Getting off on tangents is not so bad on USENET because we
> can easily backtrack a thread, say. Conversation in writing is
> different from oral conversation. But the point is that not getting
> distracted is important in conversation or anything else that requires
> thinking.
>

Makes a lot of sense to me. I fear for the day that Microsoft and Google
will try to take away my email from me, by no longer allowing third party
email operators, or making it very hard to be one.

D to Rich:

> > Sadly, the young crowd is just trading one corporate
> > devil for another equally bad corporate devil.
>
> Rubbish! When I'm out in bars and night clubs, I get loads
> of women by telling them I'm a regular usenet user!

It's not what you say, it's the way you say it.

--
() ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
> Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> wrote:
>> I've tried out mastodon and I don't like it. Only usable for
>> chit-chat, you can't open a "thread" in a new tab by middle click,
>
> Any web dev that breaks middle click to open a link in a new tab should
> never be allowed to work on any web projects ever again.

I've seen reference to it requiring Javascript, in which case that
might be deliberate to avoid people opening a big bunch of tabs at
once, therefore requesting the full bloated JS interface from the
server each time and causing extra server load.

Discourse annoyes me that way. It allows you to open threads in
new tabs, but then depending on my internet speed when I go to a
new tab I'm looking at a loading animation for 5 - 30s. There's
a JS-free version offered to "unsupported" browsers that I usually
use, but it doesn't have a way to go straight to the last page of
a long thread, and no search.

Facebook/Twitter people don't interest me much, it's clunky web
forums that actually annoy me more. I must get around to trying to
build a web forum to NNTP gateway one day, although It'll probably
send me crazy trying to keep up with scraping different forum
platform page layouts.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

Computer Nerd Kev:

> I must get around to trying to build a web forum to NNTP
> gateway one day, although It'll probably send me crazy
> trying to keep up with scraping different forum platform
> page layouts.

In case you are building it for the heck of it, there is one
already:
<https://news.novabbs.org>

If, on the other hand, your ambition is a bridge between
real web forums and NNTP, there have been working
implementations in englishforums.com (many years ago) and
the Microsoft forums (via NNTPBridge, not so many years
ago). Both were abandoned, partly because forums do not
agree with NNTP either ideologically (centralisation)
physically (different message format). For the same reason
Discourse is not a replacement for mailing lists, just a
lousy surrogate for them. Somehow the majority of users
prefer wading the bloated and clumsy web interfaces of their
Chrome-based browsers...

--
() ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments

On 7/25/24 5:03 AM, Rich wrote:
> D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, The Real Bev wrote:
>>
>>> On 7/24/24 2:08 AM, D wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>>>>>
>>>>> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>>>>>
>>>>>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>>>>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
>>>>> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
>>>>> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
>>>>> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
>>>>> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
>>>>> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
>>>>> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
>>>>> for immediate comfort.
>>>>
>>>> It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
>>>> their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
>>>> evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
>>>> hoops to jump through.
>>>>
>>>> But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
>>>> islands eventually?
>>>
>>> How would that work? The aforementioned young are too stupid to realize how
>>> trapped they are and/or too ignorant to do anything about it if they DO
>>> figure it out. The rest of us are just too damn tired :-(
>>>
>>
>> A slow building up over time? Even if the majority is too stupid, perhaps
>> there are a few who do see the light?
>
> This is how it almost always happens (i.e., anyone remember 'myspace'
> from years ago)? And I've seen news articles that imply the shift is
> already well underway for facebook. Apparently the "young crowd" (as
> in the 20somethings and below) are all on Instagram because "facebook
> is for old people" (i.e., their parents, aunts, uncles, etc. are on
> facebook).
>
> Sadly, the young crowd is just trading one corporate devil for another
> equally bad corporate devil.

Worse, I think. The level of thought required has gone steadily
downhills. Usenet people still pay attention to writing clearly and
ENOUGH to get their point across. One-liners, unless funny, just don't
cut it. OTOH, I've noticed that we rarely intersperse comments any
more. In our favor, we rarely top-post.

Facebook discourages complex discussion. For one thing, it's sometimes
really hard to get back to the post that you spent some time thinking
about before you were ready to reply, and then that post is gone.
Probably still there, but not easy to find. So most comments are just
off-the-cuff reactions, which is OK, but it would be nice if there were
more.

Can't speak to twitter or the other things because I don't use them, but
I suspect that there is even less complexity involved.

So what the kids have now is a series of post-it notes.

--
Cheers, Bev
"In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has
had to worry about where the next meal would come from."
-- Peter S. Drucker, who invented management

On 7/25/24 8:38 AM, D wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 25 Jul 2024, Rich wrote:
>
>> D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, The Real Bev wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 7/24/24 2:08 AM, D wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>>>>>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
>>>>>> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
>>>>>> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
>>>>>> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
>>>>>> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
>>>>>> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
>>>>>> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
>>>>>> for immediate comfort.
>>>>>
>>>>> It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
>>>>> their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
>>>>> evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
>>>>> hoops to jump through.
>>>>>
>>>>> But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
>>>>> islands eventually?
>>>>
>>>> How would that work? The aforementioned young are too stupid to realize how
>>>> trapped they are and/or too ignorant to do anything about it if they DO
>>>> figure it out. The rest of us are just too damn tired :-(
>>>>
>>>
>>> A slow building up over time? Even if the majority is too stupid, perhaps
>>> there are a few who do see the light?
>>
>> This is how it almost always happens (i.e., anyone remember 'myspace'
>> from years ago)? And I've seen news articles that imply the shift is
>> already well underway for facebook. Apparently the "young crowd" (as
>> in the 20somethings and below) are all on Instagram because "facebook
>> is for old people" (i.e., their parents, aunts, uncles, etc. are on
>> facebook).
>>
>> Sadly, the young crowd is just trading one corporate devil for another
>> equally bad corporate devil.
>
> Rubbish! When I'm out in bars and night clubs, I get loads of women by
> telling them I'm a regular usenet user!

Way to go, guy! I assume you also flash a wad.

Maybe 20 years ago I would chat with the people I rode up with on the
ski-lift. 6 minutes. I asked them if they were involved with usenet
and the skiing newsgroups. Not a single one for several years, maybe
120 rides per year. And this is before the ascendancy of facebook.

Most of the usenet people I've "known" since 1995 have switched to
facebook, and a significant percentage of those have just disappeared.
Some of us are still hanging in, though. Those are my facebook
'friends' along with RL friends and friends of friends. Mostly we all
know who we are and some of us have even met each other IRL.

And if we really want to talk about stupid, there's always Nextdoor...

--
Cheers,Bev
"It is a matter of regret that many low, mean suspicions
turn out to be well-founded." -- Edgar Watson Howe

Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.moc> wrote:
> Computer Nerd Kev:
>
>> I must get around to trying to build a web forum to NNTP
>> gateway one day, although It'll probably send me crazy
>> trying to keep up with scraping different forum platform
>> page layouts.
>
> In case you are building it for the heck of it, there is one
> already:
> <https://news.novabbs.org>
>
> If, on the other hand, your ambition is a bridge between
> real web forums and NNTP, there have been working
> implementations in englishforums.com (many years ago) and
> the Microsoft forums (via NNTPBridge, not so many years
> ago). Both were abandoned, partly because forums do not
> agree with NNTP either ideologically (centralisation)
> physically (different message format).

Perhaps I was too vague, I'm talking about something run
separately from the forum operators, like Gwene does with RSS.
I described my ambitions better last year in news.software.nntp
when I asked about any existing projects (without receiving any
relevent suggestions). See below.

Later I found this project that might help as a basis for the forum
scraping aspect:
https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl

Though I don't think I could rely on that project to be maintained
and keep up with forum platform changes, since a recent comment
from the author is:
"Sadly, I haven't had much time to continue this project as I'm
currently very busy with another one."
So I'd probably have to maintain something like it myself, which
might not be worth the pain.

Message-ID: <651b4c54@news.ausics.net>
Subject: Client-Side Bridge to Web Forums?
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp

Web forums keep annoying me more and more with bloated interfaces,
so I'm using them less and less, yet there's less and less to read
on Usenet too. So lately I've been considering, not entirely
seriously, writing a program to scrape specific web forums and
generate a news spool with the content of the forum's latest posts
for me to read (either locally, or perhaps remotely via NNTP).

Has anyone done this before? I know there are various web forum
platforms that support NNTP server-side, but I'm talking about web
forums hosted by other people who I have no association or
influence with. Has anyone done something that's purely a
client-side implementation?

Simple Machines Forum and Discourse are prime targets for me, maybe
phpBB too. Most don't have RSS enabled, or the feed only shows the
start of new posts. The ideal would be a system supporting scrapers
for multiple forum platforms which can be easily extended.

Support for posting would be nice, but read-only access in a news
reader (Tin) would be better than nothing.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

On Fri, 26 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:

> D to Rich:
>
>>> Sadly, the young crowd is just trading one corporate
>>> devil for another equally bad corporate devil.
>>
>> Rubbish! When I'm out in bars and night clubs, I get loads
>> of women by telling them I'm a regular usenet user!
>
> It's not what you say, it's the way you say it.
>

;)

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024, The Real Bev wrote:

> On 7/25/24 8:38 AM, D wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 25 Jul 2024, Rich wrote:
>>
>>> D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, The Real Bev wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 7/24/24 2:08 AM, D wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Wed, 24 Jul 2024, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> [Followup-To: comp.misc]
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Athel Cornish-Bowden to Steve Hayes:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Katy Jennison is another RR who doesn't seem to be here
>>>>>>>>> any more. I still see her sometimes on Facebook.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Yes, but she specifically announced that she was leaving.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There is an epidemic abroad of people leaving clean, stable,
>>>>>>> accessible, and independent venues such as Usenet, Fidonet,
>>>>>>> Mailing lists, and IRC, for centralised capitalist
>>>>>>> corporate-owned cenusured commercial "products" that are
>>>>>>> huge, bloated, tasteless, and require up-to-date hardware,
>>>>>>> OS, and software. To me, this is a reiteration of the story
>>>>>>> of the red pottage[1]: selling one's freedom and cleanliness
>>>>>>> for immediate comfort.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It is a shame, but when I walk the city streets and see the young with
>>>>>> their faces in their smart phones, I am not surprised. You get all the
>>>>>> evils as preinstalled little icons, and the good stuff requires a few
>>>>>> hoops to jump through.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But I do wonder if there will be a movement away from the corporate
>>>>>> islands eventually?
>>>>>
>>>>> How would that work? The aforementioned young are too stupid to realize
>>>>> how
>>>>> trapped they are and/or too ignorant to do anything about it if they DO
>>>>> figure it out. The rest of us are just too damn tired :-(
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> A slow building up over time? Even if the majority is too stupid, perhaps
>>>> there are a few who do see the light?
>>>
>>> This is how it almost always happens (i.e., anyone remember 'myspace'
>>> from years ago)? And I've seen news articles that imply the shift is
>>> already well underway for facebook. Apparently the "young crowd" (as
>>> in the 20somethings and below) are all on Instagram because "facebook
>>> is for old people" (i.e., their parents, aunts, uncles, etc. are on
>>> facebook).
>>>
>>> Sadly, the young crowd is just trading one corporate devil for another
>>> equally bad corporate devil.
>>
>> Rubbish! When I'm out in bars and night clubs, I get loads of women by
>> telling them I'm a regular usenet user!
>
> Way to go, guy! I assume you also flash a wad.
>
> Maybe 20 years ago I would chat with the people I rode up with on the
> ski-lift. 6 minutes. I asked them if they were involved with usenet and the
> skiing newsgroups. Not a single one for several years, maybe 120 rides per
> year. And this is before the ascendancy of facebook.
>
> Most of the usenet people I've "known" since 1995 have switched to facebook,
> and a significant percentage of those have just disappeared. Some of us are
> still hanging in, though. Those are my facebook 'friends' along with RL
> friends and friends of friends. Mostly we all know who we are and some of us
> have even met each other IRL.
>
> And if we really want to talk about stupid, there's always Nextdoor...

I never had a facebook account, so my evolution went from brief usenet in
the late 90s, to BBS:s, to web forums for many years, and lately a come
back for usenet.

I think there is a small trickle of new people from the digital minimalism
movement.

On Fri, 26 Jul 2024, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

> Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.moc> wrote:
>> Computer Nerd Kev:
>>
>>> I must get around to trying to build a web forum to NNTP
>>> gateway one day, although It'll probably send me crazy
>>> trying to keep up with scraping different forum platform
>>> page layouts.
>>
>> In case you are building it for the heck of it, there is one
>> already:
>> <https://news.novabbs.org>
>>
>> If, on the other hand, your ambition is a bridge between
>> real web forums and NNTP, there have been working
>> implementations in englishforums.com (many years ago) and
>> the Microsoft forums (via NNTPBridge, not so many years
>> ago). Both were abandoned, partly because forums do not
>> agree with NNTP either ideologically (centralisation)
>> physically (different message format).
>
> Perhaps I was too vague, I'm talking about something run
> separately from the forum operators, like Gwene does with RSS.
> I described my ambitions better last year in news.software.nntp
> when I asked about any existing projects (without receiving any
> relevent suggestions). See below.
>
> Later I found this project that might help as a basis for the forum
> scraping aspect:
> https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl
>
> Though I don't think I could rely on that project to be maintained
> and keep up with forum platform changes, since a recent comment
> from the author is:
> "Sadly, I haven't had much time to continue this project as I'm
> currently very busy with another one."
> So I'd probably have to maintain something like it myself, which
> might not be worth the pain.
>
> Message-ID: <651b4c54@news.ausics.net>
> Subject: Client-Side Bridge to Web Forums?
> Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
>
> Web forums keep annoying me more and more with bloated interfaces,
> so I'm using them less and less, yet there's less and less to read
> on Usenet too. So lately I've been considering, not entirely
> seriously, writing a program to scrape specific web forums and
> generate a news spool with the content of the forum's latest posts
> for me to read (either locally, or perhaps remotely via NNTP).
>
> Has anyone done this before? I know there are various web forum
> platforms that support NNTP server-side, but I'm talking about web
> forums hosted by other people who I have no association or
> influence with. Has anyone done something that's purely a
> client-side implementation?
>
> Simple Machines Forum and Discourse are prime targets for me, maybe
> phpBB too. Most don't have RSS enabled, or the feed only shows the
> start of new posts. The ideal would be a system supporting scrapers
> for multiple forum platforms which can be easily extended.
>
> Support for posting would be nice, but read-only access in a news
> reader (Tin) would be better than nothing.
>
>

Read only sounds very simple. I usually scrape in python with the requests
library and the beautiful soup library. A simple scraping loop could look
like this (modify per web board of course):

for page in range(100, 150):
html = requests.get("https://www.svt.se/text-tv/" + str(page))
soup = BeautifulSoup(html.text, 'html.parser')
div_bs4 = soup.find('div', {"class": "Content_screenreaderOnly__3Cnkp"})
try:
email_body += div_bs4.string + "\n"
except AttributeError:
None

So basically a range of pages, then loop over those pages, clean it up
with beautifulsoup, and then generate messages for nntp. In my case, the
code generates an email message, so I can read the content in my mail
client instead of online.

What you could do then, is to generate nntp format files and dump them
into leafnode, and then read locally with a nntp reader by connencting to
leafnode.

That would, very broadly and high level, be how I would do it.

https://www.leafnode.org/ .

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>
> Read only sounds very simple. I usually scrape in python with the requests
> library and the beautiful soup library. A simple scraping loop could look
> like this (modify per web board of course):
>
> for page in range(100, 150):
> html = requests.get("https://www.svt.se/text-tv/" + str(page))
> soup = BeautifulSoup(html.text, 'html.parser')
> div_bs4 = soup.find('div', {"class": "Content_screenreaderOnly__3Cnkp"})
> try:
> email_body += div_bs4.string + "\n"
> except AttributeError:
> None
>
> So basically a range of pages, then loop over those pages,

You need to sync it to the messages in the forum index though,
otherwise when they get a spam flood of messages that the admin
deletes, or just jump the thread counter around for some other
reason, the scraper is stuck looking for the next 25 threads
after the last one it saw when it needs to jump forwards 150. I
guess you could interpret the deleted thread pages and crawl
through them, but then you need the crawler to remember the gap
that was left so it doesn't forget to check for new posts in the
threads before the spam flood.

So even if it's possible to iterate over threads that way on all
forum platforms (which I'm not sure about), I think it would be
more reliable in the long run to parse the index pages to determine
which threads to retrieve. Also less risk of getting blocked by web
servers for too many requests.

But thanks for the example. I'm not really sure whether a HTML
parser library would be helpful or just a pointless extra layer
of complexity. So far I've just used regular expressions for
scraping webpages. I was thinking along the lines of a template
system defining strings that indicate the start/end of fields (and
any key features in-between) ideally allowing new forum parsers to
be added without needing to touch the code. There must be things
like that around already...

Perhaps I'm determined to make it hard for myself, but if it broke
all the time and was complicated to fix, then that would be worse.

Anyhow now I've got onto thinking about that I've wasted all the
time I was actually going to spend finishing a PHP static site
generator to format data that I scraped off a website last week.
That seemed simple at first too...

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

[...]

> I never had a facebook account, so my evolution went from brief usenet
> in the late 90s, to BBS:s, to web forums for many years, and lately a
> come back for usenet.
>
> I think there is a small trickle of new people from the digital
> minimalism movement.

Some people think of Stack Overflow as a certain replacement or
competitor for the USENET. But have you considered that perhaps they
could be getting near their end? With Google Groups leaving the USENET,
I wonder if the USENET will house the experts once again. Experts are
people who study. People who study do need to exchange ideas. These
trendy tools out there are obviously inadequate for experts. So there
must be the need for experts to communicate. And when we look at the
USENET today, it's doing great.

And if you're someone who has come back to the USENET, we can ask---why?
What happpened that brought you back? If you're not an outlier, then
perhaps you're an illustration of a relevant phenomenon.