Hey also. Gopher is also getting a bit of a hit, but mostly due to a new protocol someone came up with called Gemini. It’s like Gopher a lot but has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown.

You can find out more about it here. I recommend Lagrange for your client. Two places I like to go to are Station (gemini://station.martinrue.com/) and Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/). BBS (gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) is also a new one on the scene.

And the nice thing about Lagrange is that it also supports the Finger protocol which basically is a way to read the .project or .plan file on a given user for the indicated system. Those files for those that never used them allowed a user to type a short status update into them that folks could then poll at any given time. Basically “ye olde status update”.

There’s a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/) and it works really well in Lagrange.

The fact that usenet has still hung on all this time as more than just a place for people to share pirated files is honestly impressive, and also is a pretty decent endorsement. Unfortunately it has a fair number of weaknesses, especially in terms of moderation tools and access these days, but ultimately a lot of what people want in a social media platform can be found on usenet. An effort to update it for modern sensibilities might actually create something pretty cool.

I’m all for getting into old school tech, I even like to browse neocities.org on occasion just for the hit of nostalgia for the old web rings. I never got into newsgroups though, and I’m wondering what reasons you might use that instead of something like Lemmy, Mastodon etc?

Apart from the piracy side, I know all about that already lol