this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Clearly you aren't old enough to remember why Usenet faded away in the first place. It was the first platform to drown in an endless torrent of spam and low quality posts
You're being charitable, imo. USENET was plagued by a seemingly never-ending parade of mentally ill savants who lived to post, lived to troll and lived to avoid killfiles. It made it deeply unpleasant.
I see in the AMA they're discussing moderated newsgroups, I never saw any in my day but frankly, moderation is often worse. Reddit had, I think, the most workable idea of them all, community policing and hiding content beneath a threshold. The unfortunate corporate reality of Reddit begat Lemmy and here we are now.
With Lemmy and the Fediverse, I don't see USENET as being in any way relevant, other than its continuing role as a solid resource for above-average pirates. I don't miss it even a little bit, it was utter rubbish by the end.
There was some moderated groups, the group name usually ended in .moderated.
All it meant was somebody with the moderator role on that group had to approve every post... only thing I never understood is how one became a moderator on those groups 🤷🏻♂️
Ultimately Lemmy isn't any better than Reddit because your "account" is tied to a server, so it isn't truly censorship resistant. It can easily get as bad as Reddit is with the ham fisted censorship at the whim of some misanthropic moderator.
Nostr is certainly the future once it matures a bit more and becomes more user friendly.
Most clients would allow you to filter out what (or who) you personally didn't want to see, without having to censor it. Actually not a bad system: allows both freedom of speech and some kind of "moderation". The system could of course be improved, e.g. by having some default, mod-curated server-side filters that users could opt into, but people would still be allowed to see the whole uncensored content if desired.
Exceptions could be made for illegal content (e.g. pirated stuff), where it would be deleted server-side by the admins (illegal defined to be "in the jurisdiction where the data is stored").
Freedom should not be taken for granted.
I started using Usenet in the early 90s and have continued to use it until today. Modern clients are very convenient and easy to search and filter out whatever you like. So no, if you aren't too lazy to learn your tools then it is more than sufficient without some dystopian social media tier control of the protocol.