From: ivan@siamics.net   
      
   >>>>> Dennis Lee Bieber  writes:   
   >>>>> On Sat, 18 Aug 2018, Tylercuddletail declaimed the following:   
      
    >> Hi 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?   
      
    > (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/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)