I still have an account. It is still useful for grabbing binary content like TV shows and movies, but that takes a lot of setup.

What I really miss are the discussions. There, it’s not as useful as it once was. All the groups still exist, but many are overrun by spam. It would be nice to see a solution that makes USENET actually useful again.

This might not be the official answer, but it feels like the right answer.

USENET. Actually useful USENET.

It’s not about allowing a single instance to own the name. The name would belong to the federation in a global namespace.

A possible scenario is to define multiple namespaces. Each namespace can be local to a single instance, or shared between many. Within each namespace, a single community name is unique.

In this model, each instance would have a namespace that it owns, and the ability to participate in many others.

The trick is in how we name the namespaces and communities. We could do this the USENET way and do something like <namespace>.<community>, so beehaw.gaming vs. global.gaming. There are other models that could work too.

What about users who want to intentionally register without an email address? Maybe to give more anonymity to their account?

It’s very early. There are a lot of great ideas here, but also a lot of details yet to be worked out. Also lots of bugs.

I wasn’t on Reddit in the early days, but I expect it had problems too. I know twitter did.

If you’re a developer or have any skill in that area, I’d encourage you to contribute. If not, I’d ask for 2 things:

1. Have patience and a bit of grace with the devs, operators, and mods, especially in these early days.
2. Get active and talk about what you want and what’s not working for you.

This is your chance to help make “Thing n+1” better than “Thing n”. Chances like that don’t come around very often.

Signed up, downloaded, launched.

Nice work. I’ve been using Mlem. It’s been working fine for me, but I’m eager to try out other apps!