Pretty much the question. I heard about Usenet a while back but never managed to wrap my head around it.
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.
This gives a brief overview of Scuttlebutt with a link to a more technical breakdown.
That said, I remain confused by the other person’s description, as I’m not sure how it’s accumulating posts while “disconnected from the Internet”. I follow how it works when connected, but not so much how it would work as they’ve described it, at least in the disconnected circumstances, unless it’s sorta how I asked.
The Internet is a network of networks. Nowadays, everyone tends to have always-on connections to the entire thing, but back in the day, many of the networks spent a lot of time disconnected from each other. Usenet was designed to mostly transparently handle this by the local network having an aggregating server that would collect all the local activity and share it with other Usenet servers when it could reach them.
Remember that even the local activity was people connecting with teletype terminals and dialing up over modems from remote systems. Long distance trunking fees were a big deal, and Internet routing had to deal with the possibility that there was currently no route to the destination address.
