rek2_nntp and Usenet Reborn released!

Posted on 2025-04-30

After years of on-and-off development, they’re finally usable!

Hello, fellow hackers, tinkerers, DIYers, and creators! It’s been too long since my last update, but exciting things have been brewing.

Life Updates

Our 2600 Madrid meetups continue to thrive, with fresh faces joining the crew recently. On a personal note, I traveled to Alicante to catch KRSONE in concert and even painted a mural with childhood friends! Check out a snippet of the adventure here:

Usenet Reborn: A Rust-Powered Journey

For months, I’ve been hacking away at a passion project: Usenet Reborn, a lightweight, modern Usenet client. While I adore SLRN, I rarely use 45% of its features—so I aimed to build something minimalist yet functional.

The project demanded a custom Rust NNTP library (rek2_nntp) with TLS/SSL support and niche features missing in existing crates. Many libraries felt like abandoned academic projects, so I dove headfirst into the code. Early versions were rough, but motivation surged when I noticed hundreds of downloads on crates.io!

Fueled by this, I spent three weeks refining rek2_nntp into a robust foundation. Then, in a caffeine-fueled sprint, I transformed Usenet Reborn from a barebones prototype to a beta release in just two weeks! It’s now on crates.io as v0.2 (beta due to minor pre-1.0 bug-squashing).