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

[nixzusehen.livejournal.com]

The worst part is that Usenet in general has largely been replaced with webforums, which is like VHS's uglier, less useful little brother beating out Betamax. (To extend an analogy that's been in the news a lot lately).

I wish Usenet had found a way to evolve into the modern era. I think it had a lot of arrogant (i.e. no HTML evvvah!!!) news admins that helped kill it by refusing to let it evolve. Well, that and the fact that people never really understood that the Internet is much more than the web...

[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.

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

I think Usenet II was doomed from the get-go as most of the real proponents were busy posting in other groups and Other Places. I haven't looked in for quite a long time, but there was reasonable traffic and actual people conversing in the latter last time I was there - something Usenet II never really managed to get.

Frankly, the 'web forum' concept annoys me (I have a preferred client, why should I use a web thing?) and mailing lists come a close second (There was a better solution for this, so why are we using mailing lists?).

The problem is when heirarchies / networks are too small, the actions of a single individual can quickly push people out. When they're too big, one can't keep the signal-to-noise ratio up. Human nature finishes it off.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Hudson at InterAccess sounds like a right dickhead.

[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.

[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.

Use(less)netII

[lammah.livejournal.com]

The way to deal with a ghetto is to depopulate it, leaving it to service what it does for 99.9% of its volume (multimedia/binaries), not to try to barricade from the inside. That there hasn't been a suitable replacement (web-based forums/RSS) is a different issue.

[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.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

Yo,

At one point in the recent past, you alluded to some Windows tools that allowed one to back up an entire LiveJournal, comments and all. Would you mind refreshing my memory? Thanks.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

ljArchive (http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive)