The other thing I would advise is reading RFC 1855: Netiquette, section 3.0 (One-to-many communication) and 3.1.3 (NetNews guidelines), as anyone still hanging out in the discussion groups is likely to be an ancient being like me who gets hung up on things like quoting protocol.
The parts of it where I used to hang out are. I stay subscribed to a few discussion groups, mostly for the sake of nostalgia. Of those, rec.arts.anime.misc is the busiest, with maybe a half-dozen on-topic posts a month (I’m ignoring the rash of recent warez posts). ~25 years ago, it got more than a hundred posts a day. Another one up in the alt hierarchy hasn’t had any legitimate posts in more than a decade, as far as I can recall, although it was always much lighter-traffic.
Maybe some of the other hierarchies, like comp.* or talk.*, are doing better, but the place really is a shadow of its former self. I think part of the problem is that many ISPs no longer have servers, so you have to either find one of the few remaining free servers or buy service from somewhere like Giganews to get on.
The other thing I would advise is reading RFC 1855: Netiquette, section 3.0 (One-to-many communication) and 3.1.3 (NetNews guidelines), as anyone still hanging out in the discussion groups is likely to be an ancient being like me who gets hung up on things like quoting protocol.
Wait, that makes it sound like Usenet is dying… Is it really that empty? :(
The parts of it where I used to hang out are. I stay subscribed to a few discussion groups, mostly for the sake of nostalgia. Of those, rec.arts.anime.misc is the busiest, with maybe a half-dozen on-topic posts a month (I’m ignoring the rash of recent warez posts). ~25 years ago, it got more than a hundred posts a day. Another one up in the alt hierarchy hasn’t had any legitimate posts in more than a decade, as far as I can recall, although it was always much lighter-traffic.
Maybe some of the other hierarchies, like comp.* or talk.*, are doing better, but the place really is a shadow of its former self. I think part of the problem is that many ISPs no longer have servers, so you have to either find one of the few remaining free servers or buy service from somewhere like Giganews to get on.