I’m using the calendar in my Pomera to write daynotes for the first time. It’s neat, it’s a lot easier to just write on this thing, as much as it is to produce uncaught typos.

Anyway. I’m a member in a semi-private library. It’s small and attracts a different audience than the usual libraries, particularly as membership has a fee, and not a huge amount of benefits, but there are some dleightfully genteel tousles that take place here, and an intimacy with the staff - coupled with the patrons, it often feels like the set of a sit-com from the 1990s. Is the reading room silent or not? Does a text message warrant a hiss from other patrons?

Today’s warning was there would be a gentleman in the reading room with a boomiing voice. So far, he’s been completely silent. This contrary pairing of two-non events brings me immense satisfaction.

Update: no, his guest has arrived. Ringtones, unending banter; right complaint, wrong person.

So while I’m surprised that NNTP is still around, just, and I’m looking for modern clients, the meaning of ‘net news’ has undergone a technosemantic drift; originally referring to uucp- (and later NNTP)-borne online textual discussion, it later came to refer to RSS and Atom feeds of blogs.

Usenet, the uucp and NNTP protocols, distributed a decentralised, hierarchical set of global discussions, to which anyone could contribute - had they access and infrastructure.

Usenet was too hard; even though Netscape suite came with an integrated NNTP reader, it was boring, it was fussy; and really, why set up servers and manage subscriptions and batch download text when the web was there, with pictures and animated gifs and just worked? Old timers complaining about the Eternal September could keep it.

Blogs were the outposts of the Web’s Own celebrities. The ritual of typing in URLs gave way to News Aggregation as platforms looked for things they could package; RSS was first prominent on Netscape’s portal, as they looked for ways to stay relevant without having expensive Andressons to hire. And though they still fell, the protocol stood firm, before Google took the mantle and built RSS as a central service, like they had with email. It made sense; publishers were hit less, and subscriptions became social. We could follow each others' accounts. We had drifted from Net News meaning decentralised NNTP to centralised Google RSS.

And just as things were looking good for RSS, Google pulled the plug. OPML was exported, but the social groups could not be. There were no good reasons; perhaps the act of finding and pasting an RSS URL was too far for Google’s expected users to handle; perhaps it was not how they saw monetised online publishing to work as they became foundational online infrastructure. They left; others picked up the service and reimplemented much of it, but the damage was done. It was no longer free; and the still-cool Google showed they saw no future in it.

And now, realising Net News covers clients that merge Maston, Fediverse, Bluesky, YouTube and Reddit as information list providers, there is not so much a technosemantic drift as a complete amnesiac rebirth. News is free of Net, a needless tautology when everything comes over the net, even if the net is delivery and not interconnectivity. I am intrigued enough to bring my OldReader export (exported earlier from Google Reader) over to new clients.

But how strange a throwback. RSS intrinsically only holds on to the last few items in a feed; and if the site it was fed from is abandoned or rearchitected, what was there is lost. My reawakened feed accentuates further mistakes of centralisation; third-party intermediaries that once made sense and looked forever now lie broken and failed; Yahoo Pipes' promise of simplifying online data and converting it into RSS (amongst other features) lies not just abandoned, but salted and salting its firmaments.

And names. Names I have not seen for years; names of projects, whimsy and serious; names of people, some no longer with us, their URLs baked into OPML lists but bereft of content or appropriated by those who acquired their domains and accounts. News of upcoming Radio Programmes from 13 years ago. Announcements of extensions for programmes that no longer exist. Archives of Art collectives no longer operating. But amongst the cobwebs, the rust and sharp corners, there is still life; RSS outlived its hosts.

And here, this little place, is one more place hanging on. Is it trying to relive what it did not realise in the past? Is there less to prove with fewer peers? Is it digital nostalgia, mediating my sensations as much as our memories and thought are mediated by OpenAI and what Google retains? What once felt pioneering and intimate now feels nostalgic, abandoned; if it is not the systems that have aged, perhaps it is the people and our connections, the brittleness of aged contacts exposed as people once internet celebrities fade back into the strangers they always were, before XML let them diarise in public.

And yet, I am enjoying this; despite the creaks and distance, the intervening years of Facebook and Other People’s Platforms make this feel real, unmediated, raw. My mistakes and my insights side by side. News, technoculturalsemantically drifted into something forgotten but more real than it has felt before; not hype, not sales, not features, but a thing for its own sake, liberated finally; personal for the producer, not the consumer.

I’m writing about the Eternal September in my thesis; it makes sense as a still extant metaphor. However, some of my research warrens pointed me at still-operational public NNTP servers, and postings as recent as last year, which surprised me, as I was expecting far less vibrancy. I’m a little intrigued by them now; there’s a strange atmosphere to them, of old internet, textual internet, with a parasitic uuencoded parallel layer not meant for human readers. I saw Hogwasher and Usenapp as current apps for macOS which handle Usenet, as well as having an old copy of Unison I was reading `olduse.net' with. Visiting the site, they’ve spawned a new replay of usenet, with a 45 year delay on it. My god.

Unison hasn’t been updated for a while; I was surprised to see it was made by Panic, who have accepted it’s existence as a reminder of gentler times and made it free, the kind of freedom granted by dismissal from a costcutting employer.

micro.blog/books/978…