Usenet, short for User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that were developed after the introduction of the World Wide Web. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
The rise of community-curated knowledge networks
The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enabled billions of people to create content. At least 2.5…
What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums
Old web forums were poorly coded and rough around the edges, but maybe we gave up on them too quickly in the social media era.
NLnet; Welcome to NLnet Foundation
We support organisations and people who contribute to an open internet for all. We fund projects that help fix the internet through open hardware, open software, open standards, open science and open data. After its historical contribution to the early internet in Europe in the 1980's, NLnet has been financially supporting the open internet since 1997.
Hypermedia
Welcome to the Hypermedia Protocol: a decentralized publishing and discussion network
How It All Started: Pre-W3C Web and Internet Background
1971: Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates email program to send messages across a distributed network.
First post: A history of online public messaging
From BBS to Facebook, here’s how messaging platforms have changed over the years.
Our Networks
Conference about the past, present, and future of building our own network infrastructures.
Freenet
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized applications: communication, collaboration, and commerce without reliance on big tech. Your computer becomes part of a global network where apps are unstoppable, interoperable, and built on open protocols.
InnerNets - Make internet personal again
Our mission is to bring the right information to the right person, in the right way.
NLnet; Nanoarguments
Scientific knowledge is currently scattered across papers, repositories, and disconnected platforms, with no structured way to trace how claims connect to evidence or how arguments develop. Nanoarguments builds a framework and tools for creating, browsing, and contributing to a global, federated graph of scientific discourse and evidence. Researchers and their communities can collaboratively structure claims, evidence chains, and discussion as nanopublications, which are small, cryptographically signed Linked Data snippets with precise provenance and authorship, published to a decentralized peer-to-peer network. The project builds upon the Nanodash interface to help users browse, edit, and aggregate discourse and evidence graphs, and integrates with dokieli to enable in-context authoring of nanopublications as inline annotations while reading or writing a document. A bidirectional ActivityPub connector bridges the nanopublication network and the fediverse, allowing discourse threads to start as social exchanges and crystallize into persistent, machine-readable evidence records. The project will be piloted with early adopter research groups in discourse and evidence modeling. All components will be released as open-source modules that other systems can build upon.
Lexicon Service Docs - at:// pizza thoughts
Riffing on some ways to make network services more legible to humans and machines
Lexicon Embeds Overview
ATProto’s inside out structure provides an opportunity for open, permissionless building on top of any component in the network, including its extensible data schema definition system, Lexicons. One of the opportunities this presents is users sharing their data and records with multiple apps. Those apps may be direct substitutions (different clients for microblogging say), or apps that use that data in a variety of ways, such as Popfeed an app which aggregates posts about a variety of media ty...
A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub
If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? And what would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?
Introducing Wireservice. Today, it's a WordPress plugin in alpha for publishing to @standard.site. Tomorrow, it's... another longform content lexicon? A news aggregation app on atproto? We'll see. wordpress.wireservice.net/index.php/2026/02/19/introduc…
Introducing Wireservice - Wireservice
wordpress.wireservice.netOnce you experience shared lexicons and the benefits of a single portable identity, it feels like a new open network. But the most important part is that it practically works as an extension of the web. We can add social features to our websites without even mentioning atproto. Frictionless adoption
Paul Frazee
The Atmosphere is a new open network. The features: - Your account works on all atmosphere apps - You can switch to a new provider with no fuss - Easy to make your own apps on it - Works great with personal websites And, Bluesky is an atmosphere app.
