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1 year agoAh, just realized you’re on Lemmy. No worries! Basically, there’s a few different sites that are all talking the same “language”. So while you’re on lemmy.world, I’m on kbin.social, but we both can see the same posts and talk to each other.
I had a similar experience with Reddit trying to find support from the community there. ADHD sucks, and while having a positive attitude is good… sometimes you’re tired of being positive and want to just talk about what’s frustrating.
I’ve used the jump from Reddit to just… approach it more honestly. Everyone is pretty new to this mode of operation. Be you, be transparent, be kind. I’ve felt better speaking up here than I ever did on Reddit. Best of luck!
Usenet and the message boards being referred to are ‘proto-internet’ services. Think BBS, where your computer dialed into a service, and you could interact with that builiten board, the messages and users on it, as well as any files it had available for download.
Usenet had newsgroups that were very diverse and specific, and originally were just like message boards, but at some point, the major remaining Usenet servers started just sharing to each other, or maybe more appropriately, they would reference each other.
As someone mentioned before, it’s a protocol just like HTTP. There’s a bunch of servers all hosting webpages made in hypertext, and we just jump between them with links. Likewise, there’s a bunch of servers out there hosting newsgroups, but you have to find a gateway to get started. The reason there’s no ‘one’ company is akin to asking why all websites aren’t hosted/owned by one company.
If anything… It’s kinda like lemmy/fediverse stuff. You make an account with one instance, but since the protocols are the same, you can use your account on that one instance to talk to the whole fediverse network, multiple instances.
Why it costs is because at this point, it’s an archive. A huge archive, of not just text discussions, but also all the files that have been posted since a very long time ago. And just like the currently ‘free’ archive.org, it costs money to host all of that. Usenet is a bit less resource intensive than a modern website, so it can just basically sit… But they just ask that you pay to access it, pay to have an account. In this case, you’re paying to access a network that is separated from the rest of the internet at large.