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

[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.