[Solved thanks to @tal. See instructions below.]
I’d like to subscribe and occasionally post to some usenet newsgroup like sci.physics or sci.physics.research. It’s difficult! I tried to simply enter “sci.physics” in Thunderbird’s Newsgroup reader, but apparently it doesn’t work simply like that… Even subscribing to news.eternal-september.org didn’t help – I think my understanding of providers and groups is very confused.
Could anyone kindly help?
Two different things there.
There are news servers, like news.eternal-september.org.
There are newsgroups, like sci.physics.
Any news server may provide access to any newsgroups that they carry via NNTP. To do that, you’ll need an account on the news server.
Once you have an account on that news server, you can subscribe to newsgroups there.
These days, most Usenet servers are, I think, commercial access, though news.eternal-september.org apparently provides free accounts with registration there:
https://news.eternal-september.org/
For newsreader software (which I assume Thunderbird can do; I know it as an email client) there’ll be a way to plug in your NNTP server, account name, and password in your settings. Once that’s working, you should be able to obtain and view a list of newsgroups that the news server provides.
There is no real concept of “subscription” to a newsgroup at an NNTP level in the sense that you subscribe to a community here on the Threadiverse. Some newsreader software packages will let you specify a list of newsgroups for which you download the entire contents of a newsgroup from a news server to your local computer so that you can read them when you’re not connected to the Internet. These are typically called “offline” newsreaders. They might choose to call that a “subscription”. Not all newsreader software packages support this mode of operation.
A newsreader software package may also have a list of “favorite” newsgroups for quick access, and might call that a “subscription”.
But normally (outside some unusual Usenet server software packages like LeafNode, if that’s still around, that have a caching, fetch-on-demand mode of operation), a Usenet server has a fixed set of newsgroups (which may not be a full list of all of the newsgroups out there; it looks like news.eternal-september.org doesn’t carry alt.binaries newsgroups, which are very bandwidth-heavy) and receives all of the posts to those newsgroups. End users don’t ask the news server to start receiving posts to a newsgroup via subscription, don’t affect what the news server receives the way they do instances here on the Threadiverse. You can browse any newsgroup that you have access to on the news server without a subscription.
Fantastic explanation, thank you! Now I understand the difference between “server” and “group”. I finally managed to subscribe now.
For anyone in my same position:
Done!
Thanks @tal again very much!
Looking at several of the newsreader software packages that do have offline support, it looks like “subscription” is typically used to refer to that simple action of adding a newsgroup to a list of “favorite newsgroups” for quick access.
It sounds like Thunderbird is not an offline reader. Apparently it supports a limited form of marking a group for offline use, and that groups are explicitly marked for such download via a second mechanism, not subscription:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=693668
However, this does not download the bodies of posts in such a newsgroup, just the headers. These will include the title of the post, the author, and some other information about it, and I suppose might let you see a list of posts in a newsgroup, but won’t let you read posts in a newsgroup offline, which is normally how a newsreader software package with offline reading support works.
I vaguely recall in the 90’s that email clients had offline reading for newsgroups, since the pattern with dialup was connect-grab everything-disconnect.
But that was a long time ago, and I wouldn’t trust my memory too much. Maybe I had an offline reader app.
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