BeGroups - Your door to the Usenet
BeGroups is a native application for Haiku that allows you to access the Usenet, a decentralized network of forums based on an open standard. The application is a fork of Item, a Usenet client that dates back to the BeOS era and was unmaintained since then. Additionally, it contains a built-in article viewer and editor based on Haikus built-in Mail application. BeGroups is free software released under the GNU GPL 3.0.
The BeGroups project is still very young and far from finished. It provides the basic functionality needed to actively participate in Usenet conversations, but important features are still missing. There is no TLS encryption for network connections yet, no support for proxies, and while the sorting of messages has already improved since the first preview, there's still no tree-style view yet that would make it more clear to which message another message replies.
More technical information is available on the download page. Note that we don't offer pre-built packages yet as the project is in a early stage, so you have to compile it from source.
We'd love to get feedback, be it ideas, feature requests, bug reports, ideas or offers to help. You can create Issues and Pull requests directly on Codeberg, or alternatively use our contact form.
What is the Usenet?
If you're younger than 30 or so, there's a good chance that you've never heard of the Usenet before. That's unfortunate, because the usenet is a really interesting place where you can discuss all kinds of stuff, get help with your computer or programming stuff or simply have fun. All that based on an open standard, without ads, tracking or vendor lock-in.
Think of it like Reddit, but there's no single company that owns all of it, and you can access it using a variety of native client applications on different operating systems, rather than a massively bloated and slow web interface. It's forums, like they should be, and the more I think about it, the less I can understand why web-based forums mostly replaced it. But it still lives on, it's not too late to join it.
How can I join the Usenet?
Access to the Usenet isn't bound to a specific company, instead you can freely choose one of many independent but connected servers to access the whole network, like you can choose one email provider and still write to users of all other servers. Nikisoft doesn't operate an own newsserver, we're only making the client software, but here are some suggestions.
In the past, many internet service providers offered a Usenet service that their customers could access for free. Most of them shut down the service due to declining usage, but it's still worth checking, maybe your ISP still offers it. Alternatively, here are some free servers anyone can use:
Eternal September
Eternal September is a non-commercial project operated by a private person. It has been operating under that name since 2009, and as Motzarella before that. A exact date couldn't be found. The server is hosted in Germany and publishes a statistics page with many insights about users and traffic. Eternal September is free to use and can be supported through donations.
NNTP4.NET
NNTP4.NET is a non-commercial project operated by a private person. It has been around since December 2015 and is hosted in Germany. It is also part of the Open News Network and publishes detailled information about peering partners and statistics on articles. It is completely free to use, the provider does not ask for donations.
Open News Network
Open News Network is operated by a registered association in Germany, the Open-News-Network e.V.. It consists of multiple servers which are sponsored by members of the association. The service is open to everyone and funded by donations. The project was started in February 2005 and officially made an registered association in May 2007. Being around for such a long time and being a registered association means that the service is likely here to stay for a long time.
Commercial providers
What all free Usenet providers have in common is that they limit access to text-based newsgroups. This is absolutely sufficient for the use-case we want to primarily highlight here, the open discussion network. Besides that, the Usenet also consists of many binary groups where all sorts of files are shared. Access to those groups is possible using paid commercial Usenet providers. They all have different pricing, most limit traffic or bandwidth in some way, and some even offer a free trial. We haven't tested any of them as we care only about the text content, but there are dozens of them and they're easy to find using your favorite search engine.
What's interesting on the Usenet?
That depends on your interests. There are groups about everything, from technology to politics and even more. The biggest part of the groups is in English, but there are also local groups in almost every language. Not all of those groups are highly active. In fact, you probably won't find content at all in many groups since the Usenet isn't as popular anymore as it once was.
We recommend participating in active groups where content is available. There, the chance is bigger that someone is watching and will respond to your articles. Of course, you can also try to reactivate a dead group by posting relevant content and hope someone sees it.
If you're using our Haiku-native BeGroups application, you probably care about Haiku, so check out these groups:
- alt.os.beos
- alt.comp.os.beos
- comp.sys.be.help
- comp.sys.be.misc
- alt.fr.comp.os.beos (French)
Have fun checking out the Usenet! Maybe we'll meet there :)