somebody was asking in a thread the other day about some open protocol for forums/subreddits/whatever that different people could host, that could be fronted by independent clients.
well, there you go, NNTP still exists.
write some ios/android NNTP clients that can handle multiple servers w/credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to distribute the posts to other servers.
How do you deal with spam and moderation? What about the sidebar and pinned posts? Upvoting/downvoting? There’s a lot of quality-of-life features in modern forums like Reddit and HN that you don’t have with these old technologies.
"extensions to the protocol" do you need the whole thing designed in a comment?
the original context was to decompose subreddits into their own decentralized and separately hosted things. so:
dump spam into some hidden pseudo-group that only mods can see. let them post replies to the posts which are interpreted by the server to release/delete the spam
add additional headers on posts to mark that they're pinned or sidebarred. clients will have to know how to interpret that, but you'll remain backwards compatible with everything that already exists
again if you really want upvoting/downvoting, have specially formatted reply posts which the server uses to increment/decrement the vote counter, which is presented as a special header on the posts. special clients can display it like reddit, and even old clients can probably make use of it for filtering purposes.
now, i did the design work, so you go implement it.
I don't see the advantage of doing this vs. doing a new federated protocol from scratch, with all of the modern features built-in, and accessible from a web browser rather than a separate news reader.
Moderated newsgroups existed (and presumably still do). I was never a moderator myself, but to my understanding they use an SMTP-based system. I'm sure that could be improved.
> What about the sidebar and pinned posts?
The equivalent of pinned posts would be a FAQ. Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups.
> Upvoting/downvoting?
The biggest difference between web-based discussion boards and Usenet is that in Usenet almost everything is done on the client side. Threading, searching, filtering, subscribing, blocking of users and threads, and other such administrative tasks were all done on your computer by software that you chose.
Filtering in particular could be much more advanced than what we have today. Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z".
The downside of all this was that it was entirely local, individual, and ephemeral. Usenet is a distribution protocol, not a storage or display protocol. News servers typically didn't keep old posts for more than a few months. If you wanted to save a post you either archived it yourself (possibly in your newsreader) or posted it to the web somewhere. Responses to posts provided context by quoting the post inline. Another downside is that Usenet is text-only -- you could embed binaries (and there were whole groups dedicated to that), but it wasn't normally done in discussion groups. If you needed images, you made ASCII art. :-)
Some of the downsides can be mitigated -- shared blocklists, for instance, already exist and are used by ad blockers and (IIRC) Twitter clients. But part of the charm of Usenet is that it's not a modern web forum with eternal storage and constant redesigns and monetization attempts and Official Policies from Corporate Management. It's just a place where you can talk about things. It doesn't really scale to having three million people on the same forum, but not every forum needs or wants three million participants. (And back in the day there weren't three million people on Usenet in the first place.)
Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups.
Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that! They're yet another form of noise to deal with, along with spam.
Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z".
Local scoring/filtering seems like a non-starter to me. The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds". This can be pretty awful in very large forums such as the most popular subreddits, but can be pretty great in smaller communities (such as small subreddits) or those with strongly-defined community norms such as HN.
With an entirely local system you're going to end up creating a very elaborate bespoke protocol to manage and distribute this information or you're going to force individual users to handle everything themselves (with no wisdom of the crowds). Either way is less than ideal and seems to lose much of the advantage of NNTP: simplicity. Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.
> Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that!
IIRC it was typically once a month. If you were going to post in a new group it was customary to read the FAQ and/or lurk for a while.
> The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds".
If you want a forum built around a collaborative effort to decide which posts are "good" and which aren't, then that is indeed very different from a newsgroup, where the front-line method of filtering is "skim new threads and posts and ignore what you're not interested in". I think this is mostly a matter of personal preference, although I will say that skimming was much faster and easier with a newsreader than a typical web forum UI. Here are a couple examples[1][2] of Forte Agent, for instance. (Sorry about the low resolution in the first one.) Keep in mind that the posts have already been downloaded, so navigation via keyboard shortcuts is instantaneous.
But it's also true that Usenet worked best with A) a lower volume of posts, and B) posters who put effort into proper threading and quoting.
> Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.
That seems to be the holy grail these days. Not sure if anyone can actually pull it off, but I look forward to seeing what happens.
If you were going to post in a new group it was customary to read the FAQ and/or lurk for a while.
But it's also true that Usenet worked best with A) a lower volume of posts, and B) posters who put effort into proper threading and quoting.
In an ideal world, every new poster would read the FAQ and lurk for a while, then make their best effort to fit into community norms when they start posting. Usenet was born in that idealized "first age" of the internet. But now we are in the Eternal September age (and the age of highly automated spam). We really need highly sophisticated tools of moderation and norm enforcement.
We also need it to be as easy as possible for new, unsophisticated users to get up to speed so they can start contributing. Installing an app from one of the official app stores is just about the most you can ask of new users before you risk bouncing them out the door. News readers (and potentially other tools for managing killfiles, distributed moderation, etc.) are a very big ask. You'd essentially be restricting the community to hard core, tech-savvy folks. And that's a real shame, because some of my favourite subreddits are for non-tech hobbies, where I'd find it unusual for users to have a lot of tech knowledge.
> We also need it to be as easy as possible for new, unsophisticated users to get up to speed so they can start contributing.
If you actually want to replace Reddit, I suppose. But this, too, is a matter of preference. Growing the userbase as quickly as possible is a business concern, and isn't necessarily better for the community itself.
> Installing an app from one of the official app stores is just about the most you can ask of new users before you risk bouncing them out the door ... You'd essentially be restricting the community to hard core, tech-savvy folks.
I think you are overestimating how sophisticated these systems are and underestimating what users are capable of. Plenty of people who were not hard-core tech-savvy IT experts participated in Usenet. There were many, many non-technical newsgroups, and they were quite popular.
All that being said, the blunt truth is that Usenet failed to scale. I think it got a lot of things right (and that we've thrown a lot of baby out with the bathwater in the last 25 years), and certainly we could stand to revisit that in an era where people are groping towards decentralization again. But while it might work for small forums, Usenet cannot support 800 million active users as-is.
If you actually want to replace Reddit, I suppose. But this, too, is a matter of preference. Growing the userbase as quickly as possible is a business concern, and isn't necessarily better for the community itself.
Yes, I actually want to replace Reddit. I want to have communities where people are into hobbies OTHER THAN computing.
I think you are overestimating how sophisticated these systems are and underestimating what users are capable of. Plenty of people who were not hard-core tech-savvy IT experts participated in Usenet. There were many, many non-technical newsgroups, and they were quite popular.
They had no other choice back then. I don't think you'll ever see the success of something as sophisticated as Usenet be duplicated, ever again. Non-technical users will just move to Facebook or Instagram or Discord.
Binaries groups devolved into UUEncode spam at the gigabyte level, and private servers sprang up to provide access to curated piracy, so there’s that as well.
well, there you go, NNTP still exists.
write some ios/android NNTP clients that can handle multiple servers w/credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to distribute the posts to other servers.