Pretty much the question. I heard about Usenet a while back but never managed to wrap my head around it.
Usenet is a decades-old distributed message sharing system. It’s like an old school message board. To access it, you need a newsreader. Mozilla Thunderbird is one such example.
I have not accessed newsgroups in several years, so I don’t know how active it is today. But it used to be the go-to source for “warez” and bootleg media and porn. Oh yeah, and discussions threads on myriad topics. :)
Slashdot, digg, Reddit, lemmy, 4chan, etc. are all spiritual descendents of usenet.
The software tech for usenet is old, slow, and has a learning curve. You might find it frustrating to navigate and use. However, modern newsreaders probably hide some of the complexity.
Usenet has its own protocol (NNTP) where digests of messages get passed from server to server, eventually making it out to all (or most) servers that host a particular group (like alt, sys, gov, etc.). In essence, it’s a federated digital bulletin board of bulletin boards. Many servers don’t participate in some groups such as alt.binary.*.
Usenet pre-dates the world wide web, and even pre-dates Gopher. It was designed such that a Usenet server could spend most of its time disconnected from the Internet and accumulate local posts that would then be federated in a digest when the server dialed up and connected to other servers.
The main NNTP network eventually made its way to a centralized web-accessible service and most places that used to provide an NNTP server (which was most ISPs in the 90s) eventually shut their servers down and only provided gateway and email services.
The protocol still exists though, and there’s still a small connected network.
In reality, Lemmy is the spiritual descendant of Usenet.
It was designed such that a Usenet server could spend most of its time disconnected from the Internet and accumulate local posts that would then be federated in a digest when the server dialed up and connected to other servers.
…Would this have been local posts of an individual, or sometimes a group in a LAN or something? The way you describe it here puts me in the mind of recent stuff like Scuttlebutt, albeit that’s more clearly individual-focused.
What’s scuttlebutt?
And no, not individual and not LAN. WAN. A Usenet server could easily service hundreds of folks if not thousands. It would collect all their posts and then aggregate upwards.
