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

[dpk.livejournal.com]

I think the maintenance requirements for Usenet are too high for every ISP to build and operate a NNTP server -- storage, administration, telling people that 5 days is all we can keep, etc, and now that so many people have high bandwidth links, it's no longer a major issue to ask every client to "go to the source" (as with web forums hosted on standalone servers).

Several web forums export their contents as RSS, while some reveal a pretty minimal interface (as you can see in some Google results). I think someone could hack together a great forum reader that has all of the features of your favorite news reader. It'd always lack the ability to crosspost, but I think that's probably fine.

[tskirvin.livejournal.com]

The maintenance requirements of Usenet are obscenely low compared to the world of web forums. But that's not the perception anymore, because everyone expects binaries, and, well, that's a different game altogether.

There's already an RSS-News gateway out there. It's not really very neat.