I was reading the message backlog in com on SDF this morning and noticed that cfenollosa is on a nostalgia trip through Usenet and looking for active newsgroups. I still occasionally fire up Gnus and read Usenet articles. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are spam (though Gnus does a good job of tackling that), followed by link postings. That said there are still some small newsgroups with discussion that I occasionally post to. Here’s a list of groups that I’m subscribed to that may be of interest:

  • alt.ascii-art: Occasional ASCII art postings, quiet.

  • alt.folklore.computers: mostly conversations surrounding computer and technology history, mixed in with link postings.

  • comp.infosystems.gopher: gopher discussion, virtually no spam, quiet.

  • comp.misc: a fair bit of technical discussion mixed in with link postings to technology-related articles. Relatively high signal-to-noise.

  • rec.humor.oracle: No posts since October 2019, but I’m holding out hope that the Internet Oracle will once again share its infinite wisdom.

  • rec.music.classical: 50% spam these days, discussion is often uninteresting, but sometimes there’s a good thread.

  • rec.music.classical.recordings: reviews and recommendations for classical music recordings.

I also use Gwene’s RSS-to-Usenet gateway (news.gmane.org) to keep track of some feeds.

Let me know if there are any other gems out there that are worth subscribing to. For those also in the tildeverse, please consider posting to the tildeverse newsgroups!