Gmane is in danger of disappearing. It's an important gateway between mailing lists and usenet. The Gmane sysadmin is apparently getting too many threats, and it has made him ill. Here's his announcement and ensuing discussion.
Is there anyone that could help gmane stay alive?
-- hendrik
Wikipedia summarizes Gmane as follows:
Gmane (pronounced "mane") is an e-mail to news gateway. It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Gmane is an archive; it never expires messages (unless explicitly requested by users). Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service.
Alexa reports Gmane has a global rank of 12,037 (up 280).
[At the time of accepting this story, I am getting a 523 error when attempting to reach http://gmane.org/ --Ed.]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Friday July 29 2016, @07:30PM
Why USENET? my question is, Why web2.0?
USENET was based on a clean protocol, which means I could pick the client I liked more, and automate tasks to my liking. No need to beg for API keys, no need to curse when sites alter the user interface, remove features, and so on, no need to execute obfuscated code from 14 sources to load a 1MB page for a 300 word article.
USENET was distributed and kind of content addressed.
USENET was almost intentionally snuffed, instead of dying of mere obsolescence. No improvement on the protocol, few ISP maintained decent servers, unimaginative trolls, smelling like the paid kind (one of them was traced down to a telecom company, in one of my fave groups), and the association with illegal material (in fact we all see how snuffing USENET effectively made illegal material unavailable, right? right?) killed it. Dejanews, the archive, went to google, which does not miss a comma on web yet cannot seem to make old usenet articles entirely available), and now Gmane seems actively fought. I guess that for good ol internet experience we need to go gnunet, or ipfs or i2p.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Informative) by number11 on Friday July 29 2016, @08:25PM
No need to use the past tense. USENET is still there. Some of it is swamped with spam and idiots, but some of it is in remarkable good condition, including a number of computer-related groups. You can get free server access at eternal-september [eternal-september.org] for text groups. Binaries you'll probably have to pay to get access to (I use blocknews [blocknews.net], but there are other vendors.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @09:47PM
IE6 saved the old internet for the longest time, with it gone you'll have to welcome your Web 2.0 overlords :D