Pretty much the question. I heard about Usenet a while back but never managed to wrap my head around it.

  • Rimu@piefed.social
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    9 months ago

    Get a free account from https://www.eternal-september.org/.

    Then in Thunderbird , “Add a newsgroup account” with your login details from eternal september.

    Find some groups to subscribe to. Try comp.lang.python for example. Once you subscribe you can see the posts inside it.

    You’ll probably see lots of spam. To remove the spam you need to use Thunderbirds Message Filters functionality - remove all messages where their Message-ID header contains “googlegroups”.

      • Rimu@piefed.social
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        9 months ago

        Heh, yeah.

        Google does a great job stopping spam in Gmail so they could stop it if they wanted but… Just haven’t. Super lame.

          • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            Someone made the calculation that the data harvested for advertisers is more valuable than the hosting/maintenance expense they would recoup by killing it. Plus it’s tasty food for Bard.