Pretty much the question. I heard about Usenet a while back but never managed to wrap my head around it.

  • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    What it looked like was an email program with a list of subject names like mail folders, each containing subject lines of conversation threads. The threads were fully branched, replies under the correct messages, like Lemmy. Not a simple list, like email.

    Also unlike email, the messages were posted publicly instead of to you.

    There was a list of newsgroup names for different subjects, you’d pick which of those to get messages from to appear as the “mail folders”.

    The names were in a hierarchy, so computer subjects were comp.something, hobbies/recreation were rec.something etc. a bit like website names, only back to front, general to more specific, e.g uk.rec.sheds, alt.startrek.fanfic , rec.humor, rec.humor.funny.

    You’d download messages from (and upload your replies to) a server and it would share messages with other servers, like Lemmy federation. So each group would be a merge of all messages from all around the world. Effectively there would only be ONE alt.folklore.urban for instance.

    Usually your isp would run a server and you’d use that.

    At first it wasn’t mainly used as a way to share binary files encoded as text messages, but eventually that took over, isps dropped having servers and big paid ones took over.

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      9 months ago

      Oh, one really cool thing, newsreader programs would usually show you which message threads had new messages, so it was easy to keep up with interesting conversations.