Duke To Shut Down Usenet Server

DukeTech writes "This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke University more than 30 years ago. On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis." Rantastic and other readers wrote about the shutdown of the British Usenet indexer Newzbin today; the site sank under the weight of a lawsuit and outstanding debt. Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.

Comments

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[arth1]

Slashdot too, unfortunately, is a forum based on short-lived commenting.

In Usenet, I can come back from vacation, post a reply, and all the readers of the group will see my reply. Heck, I can even reply to five year old posts. And there's no redacting the group after the fact. I don't have to trust the forum owner, not even the news server owner. Because it's distributed.

There's no doubt in my mind what kills Usenet: warez flooders.
The 1% of the bandwidth taken up by actual discussions isn't why ISPs can't afford to support it anymore. The bandwidth taken up by the scavengers, as well as the potential lawsuits they bring, is.

I really wish someone got around to solve the binary problem once and for all, so Usenet again could be for discussions. By all means, it needs upgrades, like native Unicode support and better anonymisation without requiring the readers to jump through hoops, but as a push-between-nodes, pull-from-client distribution method, it's unique in both propagation potential, discussion longevity and low client latency.