Post by Dennis Lee BieberHi everyone, my name is Tyler Cuddletail. I am a 24 year old Furry.
I love being a furry. My fursona is a big blue dragon. I've been a
furry since I was 14. I've been to two conventions in my lifetime
within the Pacific Northwest.
I can't wait to make new friends.
Good luck...
I'm afraid you'll find that AFF (and ALF) are both pretty dead
newsgroups, only a few old-timers still monitoring the empty halls.
They were beginning to die off a decade ago, when "social media"
fragmented the culture
These days, I tend to think that the biggest issue with
attracting new users to Usenet is the impossibility of
emergence of a decent "mobile" user agent.
And not for purely technical reasons, either. Back in the
day, you'd write a 300+ words article and wait for days for
responses. Now, it's possible to get responses mere minutes
after posting, which is rather conductive to more or less
single-sentence exchanges.
While one of course can implement this manner of communication
on top of Usenet protocols and conventions, why bother? Why,
for instance, would one deal with proper quoting of the message
being responded to if the original fits just well along with the
response on the screen? Moreover, user abuse (say: forged From:
header) is much easier to deal with on a centralized system.
Somehow, my gut feeling is that this state of things has much
more profound effect on society than the general decline of Usenet.
As an old song goes,
We watch the shows, we watch the stars,
On videos, for hours and hours;
We hardly need to use our ears,
How music changes through the years?
Post by Dennis Lee Bieber(I don't use Twitter, Facebook, or even LinkedIn [not even when
laid off and job hunting]).
Neither do I. For me, the biggest issue with these "major"
platforms is the lack of freedom: the lack of freedom to choose
a different "host," with conditions I like better; the lack
of freedom to start my own host, while retaining my contacts;
the lack of freedom to choose a different user agent (some of
the above may provide public APIs I can try to interface with my
Emacs, but most of the time, your only choice is the one between
Firefox and Chromium -- or any of their, to put it bluntly,
rebranded copies.)
But as OP uses Google Groups, I don't think the above matters
much to him, so I suppose he can indeed try his luck elsewhere.
He's still welcome here, though.
--
FSF associate member #7257 http://am-1.org/~ivan/