blast from the past

[rone]

Usenet II is in a persistent vegetative state these days, but there was a time when i had a good amount of hope for it.  I still believe in the core ideas behind it, but i know now that a widespread implementation would be a much taller task than i expected then.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I still think a large part of the problem with Usenet that caused it to rot is not anything intrinsic to the culture (though there were a lot of problems there, of course)--it was the delivery mechanism. ISPs don't bother to maintain usable NNTP servers any more, let alone maintain them well, so most people who don't go out of their way to look for one are stuck using Google Groups, and it's just another webforum. Not to mention, the mechanisms for things like newsgroup moderation were terrible, fragile hacks.

What we need is something that looks from the client side like Usenet and runs on a newsreader-like client with threading and killfiles and the whole nine yards, but is transmitted over HTTP. And that has at least semi-secure support for moderation at varying levels.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

NTP is a badly broken protocol, but I don't see how HTTP is an improvement. NNTP is basically a multicast store-and-forward mechanism for MIME entities without any kind of functional system of federating authority for group management. HTTP gets rid of the multicast without bringing anything useful in exchange for it.

For a long, long time, I've been saying that if you really want to rebuild a modern global federated group messaging system, you're going to need to use a whole new session layer protocol. I'd propose XMPP (see here (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3920),here (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3921) and here (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3923)), but I doubt anyone would take me seriously.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The only advantage of HTTP is that it already exists everywhere. The problem with store and forward is that, for management of the local server, you're at the mercy of someone who probably doesn't care.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

"for management of the local server, you're at the mercy of someone who probably doesn't care."

Actually, the manager of the local server is usually someone who wants you to pay them— it's the managers of the other servers in the path who don't care about you.

In fact, this is— I think— the root of the problem with Usenet and just about anything else that acts even vaguely like this: everybody between the senders and the receivers needs to have incentives to protect the integrity of the network. The NNTP protocol couldn't let news server administrators do that, even with the conventions that Usenet II were trying to develop. The system of Web 2.0 protocols, which has now replaced NNTP for the purpose of facilitating global group communication, mostly paper over the problem by removing the requirement for administrators in the middle. This means it isn't any better really at facilitating group communication, and in some important ways it's worse, but at least middlemen have to do something actually useful to justify the role in the network they aim to serve. Otherwise, the system just ignores them.