OT Raspberry-pi newsgroup starts

[Huge]

Well, me too. I like Usenet, for all kinds of reasons, but someone showed me a depressing graph of traffic analysis for the uk.* groups (I wish I could find it again! Ah, here we go ...)

It's not so much the steady decline in volumes, although if continued, Usenet will be gone by 2016(*), but the 'number of posters' figures. There are 40 million people on the internet in the UK and only 1500 of them post to Usenet? (Actually fewer than that, given that a some of them will be sock puppets).

Is there some way we could make Usenet more popular? (Not "Facebook" popular, but if we could get some new blood in - I suspect most Usenet users are getting on...) Hmm; Someone's just claimed the first post made on a Raspberry Pi.

(* Likely before that - if volumes fall too far, the existing providers will drop out. Still, we could carry on as a hobbyist "service", I suppose.)

[John Williamson]

How much of the 50% reduction in message numbers and bytes used on the greenend.org graph is due to people not using the binary groups to share files with the rise of facebook and other sharing services such as soundcloud and Flickr?

It's also only showing figures since 2010, so what happened before that?

Advantages of text only usenet are that it's cheap to operate, in storage, processing and bandwidth. It's also resilient, and has been known to work when other means of communication were cut off either by government action or physical problems. IIRC, the first eyewitness reports of 9/11 came out on newsgroups, though some cellphone calls nay have beaten them.

It also works well over a slow connection.

[polygonum]

I hate to say it, could there be a DIY-banter style web interface - but one that did not have all the crap associated with the existing web interface sites? In fact, simply a recreation of a typical news reader on a web page.

Or a Facebook Usenet page? :-)

Or feed uk.d-i-y into Twitter?

I was very sad few years ago - an alt.support group lost large numbers of posters due to a combination of:

A ludicrous family spat where several of the extended family saw fit to post masses of very unpleasant stuff.

A huge wave of spam many of them saw - which was largely blocked by Berlin.

A particular very odd individual who posted in a way that some found deeply upsetting. He was permanently on medical marijuana (seriously) but had a habit of putting the blame for being unwell on the posters themselves.

The removal of usenet server access from many in the USA.

Add onto that the travesty which was Google's handling of everything to do with Usenet...

Now we see at most a dozen posts in a month and most of them are without any real reason - sort of keep-awake posts with the odd response.

[polygonum]

Agreed. That some servers seem to allow non-text was also an issue. As far as I am concerned, I would be happy for Usenet to be 100% pure text. After all we now have at least dozens of ways of sharing non-text files as and when required.

[Huge]

Volumes are seriously reduced. When I started, some 25 years ago, it was possible to grep the entire feed (Hi, Kibo!) and a number of people did. Then within a few years it got to the point that a full feed was multiple Gb a day and it became impossible. This was before the copyright thieves discovered Usenet, so the vast majority of this was actual content. Now we're down to 30Mb a day and falling, so I would say that (non-binary) volumes have fallen by > 99%. Blimey, that seems pessimistic even by my standards.

You don't have to convince me.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You have obviously never run a news server.

Its MASSiVELY STUPENDOUSLY expensive to provide storage,.. Even for text only.

Or it was back in the day. Multiple copies of every single message ever written, or even the last 6 weeks or so, mean storage is replicated for the entire usenet traffic right across the internet, and back in the day of modems and UUCP, beyond as well.

All one could say was that it was a best efforts way of propagating text messages across an unreliable and intermittent network of peer to peer machines. The ONLY thing it was good at was bandwidth.

Even that wasn't great. Again back in the day running a full text only server was chewing 30% of total bandwidth he had. Today of course with streaming videos its barely noticeable.

It's also resilient, and has been

those are its advantages.

But they are the only ones.

[Darren Salt]

I demand that Mike Tomlinson may or may not have written...

Why x86 emulation when you can (or should be able to) run a native build?

[Tim Streater]

Me too.

[The Natural Philosopher]

probably because a native build wont run on ARM?

[Gordon Henderson]

Runs just fine using prboom, etc.

That photo was taken almost 11 months ago fwiw. Do keep up!

-Gordon

[The Natural Philosopher]

prboom is not strictly doom.

[The Natural Philosopher]

..and nor is it precompiled to run on other than .86x architecture.

[John Rumm]

There is a native build of Quake IIRC...

[Gordon Henderson]

I've no idea what you're on about.

apt-get install prboom

installs the precompiled version of prboom for the Raspberry Pi (ARM)

Which is what I did 11 months ago when I took that photo.

Doom has been playable on the Pi since it came out. It may not be doom.exe, but it's Doom the game and plays identically.

Gordon

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Darren Salt writes

Because there's loads of other stuff that'll run on DOS for which sources are not available.

[John Rumm]

Traffic on uk.d-i-y is still holding strong though... 7.5k posts / month for the last 12 months. in fact a rise from 2007, but not quite up to the peak of 10k at the end of 2004.

If not using the new google groups, this may still work:

The all time posting figures are interesting:

24492 [e-mail] 23878 [e-mail] 22336 [e-mail] 21456 snipped-for-privacy@b.c 16034 [e-mail] 15966 [e-mail] 13688 [e-mail] 12038 [e-mail] 11291 [e-mail] 11130 [e-mail]

from which we can conclude:

TNP is winning since he has more than one posting address... Andy Hall is still doing well is spite of being deceased! and I obviously spend too much time here

[John Rumm]

I have yet to see a web forum that is not a slow horrid thing to use... it really ought to be possible to do something responsive these days that allows proper threaded conversations.

I suppose even an email list server could do it these days - it would not be that onerous to receive a full group feed, and email progs like TB can do threaded email as well.

No reason we could not have group access built into the FAQ page either I suppose.

For DIY that can be done in 140 characters... ;-)

[John Rumm]

I recall seeing mention of a 486 PC emulator that runs in a javascript in a browser...

There is a linux version here:

[Huge]

A 486 emulator written in Javascript?

I bet that's going to be almost as quick as the LISP interpreter written in MUMPS I came across once.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Care to say what on earth that means?

I certainly don't have more than one posting address right now.

I was at b.c till someone pointed out it was not net friendly