The Fool on the Hill: Thinking about USENET

NetNews, otherwise (and these days, more commonly) known as USENET, was the first social media system I experienced, back in the early nineteen eighties. Usenet was a huge, sprawling thing, connecting tens of thousands of servers, and carrying tens of thousands of 'newsgroups' — essentially discussion groups on specific topics.

Like modern ActivityPub, and unlike contemporary systems like 'bulletin boards', it was global (for values of 'global' that primarily covered western University campuses); unlike other contemporary systems like for example AOL or CompuServe, it was not owned or controlled by any one entity, but, like the modern Fediverse, was a loose confederation of heterogeneous servers owned by a wide variety of different organisations, including many individuals.

This meant, like the modern Fediverse, different servers might (and did) have different policies about the content they would carry.

USENET had many weaknesses. All the forms of bad behaviour which we have become used to in other Internet spaces were first prototyped and developed there. There was little effective moderation, no overall policy structure.

But it had one enormous strength: it didn't require reliable, always-on connections. Of course it did later run on the Internet, but it wasn't designed to do so. It was designed to run on the phone network. Servers would automatically dial their peers, using modems, on a more or less regular schedule

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