So while I was definitely online and prowling the Sailor Moon Fandom back in the early Usenet days, I never managed to actually discover newsgroups - my experience was limited to cruising Geocities sites and wandering wherever the WebRings would take me. What was Usenet like? That is, how did it work? Was it like an early BBS-style forum or something? A mailing list? A chatroom?
HEY LOOK IT’S A QUESTION GUARANTEED TO NOT MAKE ME FEEL OLD
Hmmmm. I suppose if I had to compare Usenet to anything, it’d be an old school BBs message board, only open to everyone rather than just whoever dialed in.
However, I recognize that if someoen doens’t know what usenet is then they also probably have no fucking idea what I mean by “old school BBs”. IT’S ENTIRELY POSSIBLE I’M CONFUSING YOU BY SAYING “DIALED IN”.
So think like a forum, only entirely text based. No graphics of any kind. It was basically that, where you would go to a newsgroup (think forum) that was about the subject you were interested in, and you could create messages that everyone could read and reply to, or reply to the messages of others.
Some groups were very strict about what could and couldn’t be posted there. Like, no social messages, only posts about that specific content, stuff like that. And I”m talking about the text group here, not the binaries, which were for posting files and such. But it was really up to the group to decide what did or didn’t happen there. It was all very community oriented.
alt.fan.sailor-moon (afsm) was really pretty open in that sense. While the main focus was Sailor Moon discussion, there was plenty of socializing and other off-topic stuff. We used to, in fact, preface our posts with [OT] before the subject line, marking it as off-topic, so people who didn’t want to see those kinds of posts could safely skip them.
Overall, it wasn’t too terribly different from a lot of what we have today, but at the same time entirely different in a way that’s difficult to really explain.
IF ANY OF THAT MADE ANY SENSE