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Usenet

The Usenet is a decentralized communications network built on top of the NNTP, which has been around for practically 5ever. These days the Usenet faded into obscurity, while it used to be the biggest network of it's kind way back in the 80s and is of "cultural" significance for what would later become Internet culture, netiquette, and vocabulary. To read Usenet posts you need a newsreader and a Usenet provider, both of which can be obtained at no cost for the most part. The various newsgroups, think the places where the actual communication is facilitated, are sorted into various hierarchies (the major ones: comp.*, humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, alt.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, talk.*, and additionally you got regional ones like es.*, japan.*, de.*, or other specific ones) each having a particular topic or theme to it

Interesting and active newsgroups

Newsreaders

Pan - http://pan.rebelbase.com/

This one is part of GNOME and is a bit bloated, however I found the interface to be the most convenient for browsing, and it worked the best out of the box. It has a GUI and runs mainly on Linux.

Gnus - https://www.gnus.org/

Gnus is the default newsreader for Emacs. As much as I'd like to say nice things about it, since I like the idea of lurking on newsgroups through a tool built-in in Emacs, I find the interface really ugly and not really pleasant to use. I'm not expecting some overengineered, spine-tingling, goosebumps-causing UI, however if I use a program, I want it to look like something that you like to look at. Maybe there is some way to change it.

Srln - https://slrn.info/

This looks like the best choice, if you prefer a CLI interface. I only included it for completeness sake, not because I have any particular opinion on it. There seems plenty of configuration options available too.

Usenet Archives

https://olduse.net/

https://narkive.com/

https://www.usenetarchives.com/

https://archive.org/details/usenet

Humor