On 09 Jul 2025, Mr. H wrote:
Anyone here still using USENET/NNTP I'm learning about this ancient social from the days of ARPANET and looking for free servers with recent moviment no need to binaries just news discussions and etc
Nitpick: I wouldn't call netnews a "social network"; the people relationship graph metadata is nonexistent there. "Online communities" is a more appropriate term for this, because newsgroups are topic-based. People congregate in such communities mainly by common interest, not personal relationship between each other.
With that out of the way, if you meant netnews/NNTP but not necessarily the global USENET; there is one here, called Tildeverse Netnews: which is text-only, isolated from USENET-at-large, and federated just within the Tildeverse. It has traffic, like, 2-3 times a week (sometimes everyday); and with some newsgroups having over 1k posts.
To view or participate, you can simply open your newsreading-capable desktop email client (like Claws Mail/Sylpheed, or even Mozilla Thunderbird), and create a new newsreading account that points to:
nntps://news.tilde.club/ ^ NNTP server "news.tilde.club", with TLS, port 563; read-only without authentication, use your Tilde.club user/password to post.
If you would like to use on-Tilde.club TUI newsreaders [0], like Alpine, TIN, SLRN, or Emacs Gnus; make them connect to:
nntp://localhost/ ^ NNTP server "localhost", without TLS encryption, port 119; no authentication needed.
Keep in mind that only `tilde.*` newsgroups are federated throughout the entire Tildeverse; while things in `local.*` newsgroups do not leave Tilde.club. [1] (Yes, this is not just Tilde.club: in general, things posted will propagate to on Tilde.team, Cosmic.voyage, Tilde.green too; and vice-versa)
Since the network is small and live traffic magnitude is at human scale, it is feasible (and recommended) to follow/subscribe to every non-archived newsgroups. [2]
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But if you are actually aiming for the global USENET instead, there is a tilde server which carries USENET newsgroups: Tilde.green. [3] However, USENET access there is only open to their own users, and only granted on request (not all members there have access). You might also want to check with them about availability of the newsgroups you'd like to use before joining too.
Outside of Tildeverse, there are also several gratis text-only USENET services which you can use to participate as well; such as:
- Eternal September (requires registration) https://www.eternal-september.org/
- Solani (requires registration) https://www.solani.org/
- Stuttgart University (anonymous read-only, I don't know much more info) nntp://news.uni-stuttgart.de/ http://www.zdi.uni-stuttgart.de/news.html
- Ausics (Australia-only, no registration required) https://newsgroups.ausics.net/
(R.I.P. aioe.org, which used to exist and provided read-post access without registration)
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I miss the cock.li mailing list as we used to exchange some words
Off-topic: I tried to register on Cock.li's email service few times in the past, but it never worked (RoundCube just gave me invalid login error every time); not sure why. In the end, I gave up, and deleted all of my accounts from there.
Where are you from folks?
I'm from Thailand.
And what are you hobbies? Me: Brazil, Code (Learning Assembly X64_86 and C just for fun)
Programming is also one of my hobbies as well. C is my first programming language, and I use it from time to time. Assemblies I do are i8051 [standalone], and i8086 (i.e. x86-16) [with DOS and PC-BIOS ABI]. My favorite duct tape programming languages are Perl and Bourne/Bash shell scripts. I could also do Java as well (Java SE, ME, very limited EE, and Dalvik/Android); and purpose-specific programming languages I have a soft spot for are Sed and AWK.
Languages aside, my designs are legacy-first, coded with full intention of "write once, run beyond my death"; which as you might expect, ${FLASHY_LANGUAGES} like Rust and Zig are off my book, and Python is on my blacklist. Only foolish man would build his house upon the sand.
Other than programming, vector art is also my forte. [5] I actually do photography as well, but I reserve the glimpse of those for people who know me in my real-life identity only. Reading (physical books) are also what I do often, but I guess I don't have much to say with this one.
Regards, ~xwindows
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[0] Actually, text mode browser Lynx also has NNTP read/post support (no NNTPS support if I remembered correctly) but it doesn't do threading; so it is okay mainly for viewing individual posts you know a URL of, or for browsing newsgroups with minuscule number of posts. It is not suitable in _navigating_ groups with substantial number of posts, and definitely not for browsing through something like the "ASCII Of?" netnews game megathread I host in `tilde.art.ascii`, which has like... 1k posts in a _single_ thread. [4]
[1] Tilde.club is a bit special, since it is a gateway which people from every tildes in Tildeverse that don't have their own tilde-local netnews service would use for reading/posting Tildevers Netnews; so the content of Tilde.club's `local.*` newsgroups would be visible to them too.
[2] Archived newsgroups have " (archived; no posting)" at the end of their description. I believe that many graphical newsreaders automatically show these as read-only as well.
[3] They are using quux.org as their USENET upstream.
[4] You may run `lynx nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.art.ascii/39` to see the thread starter. If you try to use Lynx to browse this newsgroup by running `lynx nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.art.ascii` however, you would see that without threading support, it's a flattened mess.
[5] My tilde WWW site is temporarily disabled right now; so they currently could only be viewed under Gopher at: gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/