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I hope so. I've been thinking about it recently.

You can get a free text-only Usenet account here:
https://www.eternal-september....

Then install and configure Pan or Thunderbird.

Also free accounts at http://www.aioe.org/ and if you don't mind paying, http://www.astraweb.com/ where I payed $10 for 25GBs. 25GBs is a lot of text posts.

I hope so. I've been thinking about it recently.

You can get a free text-only Usenet account here:
https://www.eternal-september....

Then install and configure Pan or Thunderbird.

Free access to text-only Usenet
https://www.eternal-september....

Free access to text-only Usenet
https://www.eternal-september....

Must be free to use.

This is a somewhat difficult, limiting condition. But AFAIK there's at least one who offers: Eternal September. I have not personaly tried them, though.

But it's decentralized. You'll mostly be talking with other people who use one of the paid services. (I decided to link to a subreddit about Usenet, because I thought it would be ironic, while also being a fairly high-quality reference.)

Provides free read and write access to all text newsgroups.
https://www.eternal-september....

Maybe I shouldn't post this here where the snowflakes can see it, but you can get free accounts here. Point your newsreader to their servers and you're in business. No binaries, but if you want those, there are lots of paid services offering them.

I even have an ebuild for trn in my Portage overlay, if you're using Gentoo. Builds and runs like a champ on x86 and AMD64, at a minimum.

Spam-free??? Can you give an example? Last time I checked (it *has* been a while) misc.rural, comp.lang.pascal.borland and others were a cesspool of spam.

The first thing to note is that a lot of spam is quite old. It's not at all uncommon for unused groups to have a lot of spam listed from ten years ago, if you're using a provider that has 2,500 days retention or something like that. Imagine how much spam your inbox would have if you scrolled for ten years and neither deleted anything nor had much in the way of filtering at that time. I'm not saying it doesn't still happen, but 'sort by date' is your friend.

That said, comp.misc has lots of active users, as does alt.comp.os.windows-10 and alt.windows7.general. If you're of the non-Microsoft persuasion, alt.os.linux.ubuntu is pretty active, as is alt.os.linux.debian, comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc, and comp.mobile.android. I'll concede that none of the Pascal groups I looked through seemed to be anywhere I'd like to actually invest my time. On the non-computer related front, rec.arts.drwho.moderated gets reasonably active during the broadcast season, and misc.legal.moderated has some really interesting discussion regarding case laws and has a number of actual-lawyers who participate.

Yes, virtually every topic one would potentially look at on Usenet has a metric ton more activity on a comparable vBulletin forum somewhere. Much as the 'Eternal September' is still referenced here and there, the masses seemed to have left Usenet and camp out on Facebook and Twitter, leaving a much smaller group of technically inclined people an experience reminiscent of the early days once again.
Eternal September provides free text-based NNTP access, with most paid providers providing block accounts for which even the smallest block will likely provide years of message board activity.

Fortunately, there are free alternatives such as Eternal September, so long as you are willing to stick with the text-only groups (which are the best part of Usenet anyway). Completely free access; just register, download and configure your Usenet client and subscribe to your favorite groups. Not all the groups are dead, and more traffic from intelligent posters is always welcome ;-)

Usenet has had its problems with trolls and spam (the latter having been the far worse problem since trolls were easily recognized and ignored) but it's main problem these days is a lack of traffic. Well, the text-only groups that is; the binary groups are, of course, saturated. But on the other hand, that lack of traffic does have a certain blessing; the few Usenet loyalists who remain are actually interested in the topics of their subscribed groups. They tend to stay largely on topic, avoid the rare troll and have a decent grasp of Usenet netiquette. It's actually rather pleasant. Plus, since there is so little traffic, you can check a day's worth of conversation in 15 minutes ;-)

Still, I wouldn't mind if there were a /bit/ of a resurgence in Usenet. I'm willing to spend a full thirty minutes per day if I have to!

I've always thought that Eternal September should offer a fully-configured Usenet client with server settings and most popular newsgroups pre-subscribed for one-click installation. I've always felt it was the initial steps to get onto Usenet, and not the problems with the content itself, that were the major problem behind Usenet's decline...

Bookmark this link or this link to find the current day of September 1993.

It's been up since September 1, of this year. Today is September 7174, 1993.

I think you meant www.eternal-september.org

> I meant it was interesting that you differentiate between "sharing binaries" and "copyright infringement."

Well, there is a difference. One is typically a subset of the other. I'll let you guess which. :-P

>There ARE free usenet servers that are text-only.

That there are.

> sort of a reverse "Eternal September" if you will.

Funny, that's the name of the one I use. http://www.eternal-september.org/

--
BMO

Usenet was great, even on 14K POTS modems, until
people simply stopped running it. Can't get a
feed anymore. :-(

eternal-september is pretty reliable and also free.

Of course, access is via the internet, so just being NNTP instead of HTML doesn't necessarily solve all possible Big Brother problems.

Oh, and if you're just looking for a traditional Usenet server, you can still read and post to text newsgroups for free - I switched to these guys back when RoadRunner dropped Usenet, for instance.

Just use one of the freely available text-only Usenet servers, like news.eternal-september.org, or choose to support a cheap one, like the excellent individual.net which costs just 10 euros (15 US dollars) per year.

Usenet is consolidating. It's not dying. Services like these continue to provide a spam-free, binary-free, high-quality Usenet feed.