Increasingly, Usenet is distributed to leaf sites off the Internet. These
are PCs in people's homes, email systems at private companies, etc.
Almost all of these low-budget leaf sites use one version of dial-up UUCP
or another. Most Usenet sites are *not* university data centers, though
most of the *backbone* sites may be. Even the backbone traffic is being
taken up by commercial providers such as Netcom, PSI, etc.
>Every USENET site has control over which newsgroups it carries. Disk
>space is the major consideration, here, not bandwidth;...
This generalization ignores the home sites. My newsfeed charges me $2/hour
plus $38/month. Normally my 80MB home news spool holds a couple of months
worth of the dozen newsgroups I read at home. Filling that spool with news
*once* costs more than the disk drive did! Over the next year I intend to
serve a few downstream sites belonging to Greens around California. These
will be dial-up long-distance UUCP feeds. I'd like to feed them
alt.gathering.rainbow, since our values are so similar.
>and the really big
>newsgroups are things like alt.sex.pictures which encode graphics.
Another generalization. My most expensive home newsgroup is the mis-named
misc.activism.progressive (m.a.p), a gold mine of information unavailable
in the convential media.
>All I'm saying is that there's no need to caution everybody about how they
>participate for fear of using too much bandwidth.
Please read the tutorial materials in news.announce.newusers.
Although the newcomers waste it, and the pictures are enormous, Usenet
bandwidth is still precious. Bandwidth in the groups which *accomplish
something constructive* is especially precious. (May I recommend
m.a.p, alt.politics.greens, alt.sustainable.agriculture, alt.save.the.earth
to those folks who think Usenet is all drivel.) This is one reason those
groups are frequently attacked by bandwidth-wasting flamers; these (usually
right-wing or "libertarian") vandals want to deprive us of the channel.
> - loca
Cameron, owner/administrator of truffula.sj.ca.us
"Truffula Trees are what everyone needs!" -- the repentant Once-ler
"There's freedom of the press; you just have to own one" -- Walter Lippman?