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Comment by terminalbraid | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.

Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.

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Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.

I don’t believe it was or continually is limited to text only, but I do believe we had netiquette back then which helped to reconsider spamming internet with media and other decorators, only to have it all forgotten 72h later

Still is, but a bit empty. https://eternal-september.org/

Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.

The eternal September complaint comes to mind, but even eternal September was a jolly walk in the park compared to what modern social media has turned into.

> Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.

Spam filtering has improved a lot since the Usenet days, but even if it hadn't we had killfiles to deal with the spam and filtering out harrasers. Doing this today would be even easier with the help of LLMs.

> Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.

Except, unlike Reddit, it wasn't centralized nor owned by a single corporation.

Usenet users did not have to obey the rules and whims of any corporation and there was thriving ecosystem of feature rich, free and open Usenet clients.

I really miss having my own killfiles and regex search abilities that were common on Usenet clients, but is missing from the Reddit clients and its web UI.

ActivityPub is essentially this in "modern" times with "modern" sensibilities (e.g. accounting for low power mobile devices that are going to hold open only a single connection and query for posts.) You can pretty trivially killfile whatever you'd like too. I vibecoded a super basic AP "client" that just speaks AP vocabulary to fetch posts from users I have in a JSON file.

it took me too long to realize ActivityPub is basically email.

I guess we only have three protocols, email, irc and BitTorrent.

Heh yeah that's a great way to put it. Email and Usenet are very similar; they both use RFC 5322 Message Format messages as their envelopes for data.

What about the registration you find so painful? It takes a single command to register a nick, if that's what you mean.

In his defence, its a single command, if you know the command

This, which is not uniform across servers, and has more work if you want to do certificate-based auth. Additionally getting a nick cloak is good opsec and also extremely not uniform.

The entire premise of cloaks as optional seems like broken UX to me. I'd like to see a new version make your connections details private by default.

Also funny watching peopel mistype the command in the wrong window and expose their "password for everything" to everyone in the chat.

I am quite used to IRC and would still always start with `/msg nickserv help` to be safe. I think the UX is okay but I wouldn't make the single command claim myself. It's similar to hopping on a unix-like machine in the wild and you don't know if you have GNU/BSD/busybox utils and there are some slight differences, so you either hope it works or check the man page quick.

To be honest, I've never encountered an IRCd where it is NOT a single command through NickServ. Setting up SASL authentication takes another single command, as far as I know. Of course, this does not involve certificate issuance through openssl command line. As for cloaking, one typically needs to ask the staffers. In Libera the process is automatic if you just want the user cloak, but let's say it's two commands: joining a channel, and saying "!cloakme" or whatever. :-) Glad to see another fellow IRCer, by the way. o/

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