Does anyone know of any great newsgroup?
I'm talking NNTP servers.
I'm morbidly curious, does anyone still use NNTP?

First question is, where to find working servers. It's been a while since I registered at news.solani.org, but then wasn't able to finish the confirmation and then never started it again.

But I still want to see, how the "my" groups are today.

It was really fun end of the 90s, beginning of 2000s, I really miss the culture, it was kind of school of hard knocks, but it was one of the best places for qualified information and help on nearly anything.

But then webforums destroyed the usenet, work and family stole my time and as my ISP closed his server (which the kept really long and was maintained by a really good admin), the days of the usenet were already numbered and I never had the drive to search a new server.

So thanks for reminding me, I'll register again.

But what reader to use today? Maybe I'll try GNUS.

@ddephor Since I mainly use Windows, I'm using thunderbird as my news reader.

@ddephor Usenet went down because it was next to impossible to found any new group. You had to prove traffic beforehand. Endless discussions.

Even worse, the German usenet. Netiquette said it was nice to give one's real name, and the Germans twisted that into nicknames allegedly violating the netiquette. Real assholes.

Then came web forums: no hassle, just get one going. The usenet folks laughed. Then people stopped using the usenet. The usenet folks laughed. Then ISPs dropped usenet support. The usenet folks finally stopped laughing.

@Fast-Nop I know, I was on the german usenet. And I loved it. It wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but it was the best source of information at that time.

It was hard sometimes, but people cared about what they where writing, this changed dramatically with web forums.

@ddephor Well that had less to do with web forums, but rather with the Eternal September.

Before, internet access was mostly from unis, so the people who wrote on the usenet were academics. But then, internet started to gain mass traction so that it became more representative of the overall population - with less than academic writing skills.

That would have happened also to the usenet had web forums not taken off.