Not Forte. Something with NZB in the name, if I recall correctly (it’s been more than a decade).
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Usenet was fun. I’m glad it’s (mostly) dead now.
Isn’t one of the primary differences here, though, that newsreaders of the time let you request anything you wanted? I mean, the problem with facebook isn’t so much legal in that sense - it’s that people don’t go to “social.example.com” to read social stuff, and it’s dominated by facebook, but that they go to facebook.com to read social stuff, and it is facebook.
It’s not like people who didn’t reach out to get alt feeds could read alt feeds - you had to subscribe to a site that carried them (or pull them yourself). That’s still literally true today - you can go to notfacebook.example.com, too - just that you have to tell all your friends to - just like you’d have had to tell all your friends to go to alt.gourmand if you wanted to chat…
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Ah, Usenet. When I start to get smug about not wasting my time on Facebook nowadays, I need only think back to how many hours I wasted on Usenet back then…
However, if I try to be a little realistic, I have to say that on those odd occasions when something I like gets quite popular, there are only two possible outcomes: Either is get commercialized, and much of what I loved about the camaraderie dies, or it simply collapses under its own weight, because there aren’t hundreds of people willing to give away their days and nights full-time and I’m left with nothing.
As I get older, I realize most of what I love simply doesn’t scale.
And yes, it was a bit crushing to realize that what I enjoyed literally couldn’t be shared. Every time it grew beyond a certain limit, it was lost.
The awful behemoths aren’t for me. But I strongly suspect they are the only way they could be for everyone else. A delightful social media experience is a labour of love, and there isn’t enough love in the world to extend that experience to a billion people.
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