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Is usenet the mitigation for age-gating?

Age-gating, the requirement to restrict access for minors to social media platforms, is now spreading across the globe.

In a shocking move, parents seem to think that it's a great idea to hand off their responsibilities to the government in this way, even though it provides yet another way for the spectre of digital id to be thrust ever further between our but-cheeks.

As a formerly young person I can confirm that kids are smart, often a lot smarter than we think.

Who didn't start drinking regularly long before the legal age at which such things could be done. I know because I was the guy who looked old enough to buy the booze on a Friday or Saturday night -- even though I was barely 16 and you had to be 21 to legally do so.

And so it will be with the social media age-gating currently being rolled out cross the world.

It strikes me that perhaps it's time to fire up some old-school tech in order to sidestep these draconian age-gating moves.

What about going back to those very first forms of social media -- bulletin board systems (forums) and usenet?

Surely there must be a few NNTP servers out there still running?

A quick check suggests that there aren't any of significance -- but surely that becomes a fantastic opportunity for entrepreneurial under-16s to set up their own network of such things.

Most have access to a fiber-to-the-home connection and an old PC on which such a server can be run. Vibe-coding a client application would be super-easy these days and I suspect that a keen group could get all those fantastic rec.* and rec.*.binaries up and running in just a few short weeks.

By organising a distributed network of NNTP servers the actual user-base of any individual server would be well under the threshold at which these age-gates usually are applied yet this could become a global network with tens or hundreds of millions of users.

Sometimes old technolgies don't die, they just go into suspended animation until they're required again.

Back in the day, downloading binaries from newsgroups was a pain in the backside, mainly because we were using dial-up access that limited us to just a few tens of Kbits per second and because there was an encoding overhead associated with the Uuencoding (ASCII representation of binary data) that swelled the files even more. Due to message-size limitations, this meant that even a relatively small binary, image or video would be spread across many individual usenet messages and nothing would be more annoying than finding that one message was missing out of the bunch.

Such hurdles could more easily be overcome these days and maybe it would be even better to ditch the NNTP protocol as we knew it, opting instead to reinvent that wheel with all the benefits modern tech could contribute.

Distributed (decentralised) networks are all the rage these days so I don't see why it couldn't be done for something that provided the functionality of Twitch, Tiktok and the like. If it was open source and anyone could set up a node then it would fly nicely under the radar and out of the control of "big brother".

Come on kids of 2025/26 -- show your rebelious streak and do what we would have done when we were your age. Stick it to the man. Build your own solution to the age-gating problem

Carpe Diem folks!

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