The big picture: The first Usenet servers opened in 1980, more than ten years before the original World Wide Web was founded. After 40 years, this distributed discussion system is still thriving and a new board now oversees its operations behind the scenes.
Usenet is a distributed network spread across multiple servers hosted around the world. This text-only discussion platform predates most online activities that Internet users participate in today, despite its original developers close their server It is still used at Duke University in North Carolina.
Usenet has a central governing body known as the “Big 8” governing body. This body oversees Usenet hierarchies, makes adjustments to existing groups, and creates or deletes newsgroups. The Big 8 team also appoints or replaces moderators and assists the Internet Systems Consortium in maintaining the definitive list of newsgroups for Usenet service providers.
Tristan Miller, research associate at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Vienna, recently divided broke the news with The Register that the Big 8 board has once again taken control of Usenet. After a period of inactivity, the board is now fully active again and has a new management committee established in 2020. This committee sees a “bright future” for the oldest discussion network on the Internet.
The newly formed Big 8 board got to work, accommodating the moderators’ wishes by deleting some old newsgroups and adding the first new group in a long time – the Gemini project. This group can be accessed at the news:comp.infosystems.gemini address with any of the various Usenet clients available today, including Mozilla’s open-source Thunderbird mail client.
The Big 8 board has also revised it official page, introducing new packages for moderators and more. Jason Evans, a Prague-based training engineer and a member of the new board, emphasized that Usenet has an important place in the legacy and history of the Internet, but also has a future. Despite the importance of social media and web-based discussion forums like Reddit, Evans pointed out that Usenet still shows “a surprising amount of activity.”
Accessing the text-only portions of Usenet discussions is easier than ever. All netizens need to do is get a reliable news client like Thunderbird mentioned above, create an account on a Usenet server, and then subscribe to various interesting newsgroups to take part in discussions. The Big 8 Board website offers a hassle-free “Get Started” experience. guide It explains how to configure Thunderbird to be an efficient tool for reading messages.