Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?
1. There has to be a movement at both protocol and community-level to bring a Usenet like forum for general consumption. Different decetralized subgroups hosting and replicating the communities for others.
2. The model needs to be rethought to ensure that the thoughts and knowledge of communities and users belong to them.
3. These forums should encourage less anonymity and more persistent communication.
4. Trustworthy individuals should run these forums, chosen by the community. Individual groups, academia, organizations running the communities but easily redistributed across to people who want it. This was usenet.
Failure to address these issues allows mega companies to exploit data and control access against users' wishes.
Taking action is crucial to prevent unfavorable outcomes and hold ourselves accountable.
329 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
If it was known to be inevitable and unchangeable for last few months I can see few of the apps cooperating to run alternative.
I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day.
What you're asking for, for free, isn't possible.
I rarely even see a bad joke, because we’re a self-selected sample of people who care about the edges of professional computing.
So I say, why not?
Twitter, Facebook, etc - everyone knows them.
Reddit, Discord
HN, presumably other domain-specific forums, IRC
Fediverse (though less so as of late), lobste.rs, presumably many that I don't know about!
Taking the larger number of people outside of the US that only use mobile devices and only use apps like FB, WhatsApp, or others I'm not familiar with, I'd go so far as saying that the average person doesn't know websites exist. If it's not present to them via an app, could they find an actual website (or at least would they even attempt to)?
Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale.
Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then admins mostly ignore those complaints. Moderators write bots that automatically surf traffic and try to automate... then the Admins come back and increase the price of API-access by 1000%, and then change the API and overall become hostile to this behavior. This cannot work either.
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At least in Usenet days, we could run our own programs in an open source model for these moderation issues.
I don't think Usenet would work. We need a way to rewind time (Usenet: once you post or once something passes moderation, it is forever more sent to everyone else's inbox). USENET was POP model, to put into email terms... while Reddit is IMAP/JMAP model, where the true state of the information is centralized to the server.
So yes, I agree with you that USENET will fail today. But the nuances of why it will fail are important to understand.
In particular: Reddit was never very good about these moderation issues. But with enough work and grit, the community came together anyway. That's good enough. I expect that USENET's moderation model is sufficient, albeit decades old. Its all the other USENET crap that won't work today (being a "POP"-like message distribution platform without any "takebacks", so no editing posts, no deleting porn that got past the spam filter, etc. etc.)
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Or maybe... USENET works with regards to API access. The *ARCHIVE* (ie: Google Groups, or Deja News if you're old enough to remember that) is where takebacks / edits can live instead.
So maybe Usenet can work, but with changes to our workflow to be more akin to 2023-level of features. By separating concerns over USENET (ie: how messages are distributed among a decentralized list of servers), and "The Archive" (which needs to be run by a trusted set of administrators), and a system where moderators will have access to "The Archive" for their own moderation purposes, we can rebuild Reddit through USENET??
Hmmm... it could work. Though I'm curious if it has much benefits over Mastodon or other solutions available today.
Assuming moderation can be automated using the recent advancements in AI
We can't just assume that hackers around the world have 80GB NVidia GPUs laying around to run high-end, usable LLMs. And we certainly can't expect people to pay Amazon Web Services for a rented GPU, those things cost significant amounts of money.
Sticking to basic automation tools we have for spam filtering and automated reading of messages and the like, lets start with Reddit-level tools of just banning, blocking, users. And a global effort that helps kill spam accounts and sockpuppets.
You're joking right?
It's not a bad start, but it's missing "trolling/shitposting".
(I'm hardly advocating that people start relying on openai for moderation, rather it would be great if people started figuring out how to do this locally with the tools we have. Their bias against chess players is pretty despicable)
1. Require university or employer emails to register (Blind uses this). Still post via alias but have a verified root email tied to a person IRL, would really cut down on the trolling and spam and nonsense.. NEETs might be out of luck but, well, their domain is the imageboard and that's not exactly what you want on usenet most of the time..
2. Require some hashcash style calculation to prove the value of a post via computation. Use an algorithm which is ASIC resistant - maybe Ethereum's old PoW?
3. as you mentioned AI - Moderation endpoints, it would be interesting to see if that can be created from LLaMA or such (OpenAI has this available but no reason to become dependent on them). People have mostly been looking at them for generation but as a classifier they also may fit the bill
I used Usenet before the Eternal September.
The reason it worked back then, is because to a certain extent, it was a relatively homogeneous group of users, meaning, people of comparable education, interests, etc.
I'm not really interested in sharing a newsfeed with a kitchen cabinets spammer or a Russian troll or some MAGA trumpet endlessly gazing upon Hillary's emails, etc.
Also, the legal landscape is different today, we're a long way from a pre-DCMA world. Usenet servers act as common carriers but they are not legally common carriers (in my opinion) which means if I am right, the experiment will end as soon as someone decides to litigate against a server operator for passing on material that someone felt offended by. Not even copyright violations, just something they were offended by. For example, it is illegal to insult Ergodan (really) and while that law isn't enforceable here, it was elsewhere until recently in places like Germany which still had laws on the books saying it wasn't legal to insult foreign heads of state, etc. So it's just a big litigious mess now. You may have noticed the other year how the right-wing wanted to sue/shut-down the tech companies for being too woke and suppressing their free speech rights, etc.
Usenet was a lovely time and I miss it, but that ship sailed long ago and isn't coming back.
Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] of a similar vein that the USSC declined to hear.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear...
USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?
My Usenet was fairly homogenous, because I only subscribed to a handful of groups. You simply couldn't read the traffic on 100,000 groups! But the full list of groups was extremely diverse.
The list of groups also depended on which server you were using as your feed. Many servers carried groups dealing with some product the operator sold; those groups weren't always relayed by other servers. In fact I guess that's still the case.
economical, social, political, legal, regulatory constraints make it really pragmatically impossible
we may have the technology. but we lack the _political will_
(I'm open to suggestions of what term to use for what we appear to lack)
Artificially constructing a similar level of friction/gatekeeping would have major downsides that might not be worth it, but it could theoretically achieve a community that behaves as that past one did, if that's the goal. Sort of a CAPTCHA to prove you're not just a human, but a leet one. As others have said, HN achieves this in a way. Perhaps non-tech communities can do a similar thing. But educational materials to slowly penetrate the barrier must exist.
On the technical side, it’s probably a lot easier to gatekeep, but even HN has degraded significantly since its early days. Lobster.rs is the only truly technical one that has kept that spirit (to this day I am still not a member, which kind of proves its gatekeeping abilities hah).
p.s. love the username!
I guess that aspect can't really be replicated anymore. Back when information moved slowly (in person, telephone, print) and broadcasts only included things with mass appeal (TV/radio ads, etc.) knowledge of a small but high quality community would remain tight for a long time, growing slowly. But the cat's out of the bag now: even the most obscure thing only needs to be posted in some place with tons of eyeballs (which simply could not occur at scale back in the day), if it's good it's upvoted to the top, and immediately it's no longer obscure.
Thanks!
Equally fun, your "From" address (just another header) was also under your control.
So it was fairly trivial to post articles From: anyone, Approved: yes.
In this way, it was pretty similar to SMTP email in the same era. Before EHLO and reverse lookups and server identification and SPF and DKIM and DMARC and spam filters and universal skepticism, email was simple to spoof.
Now, the readers of USENET at the time were also pretty savvy, and there were other noneditable headers attached to your message that might betray your malfeasance. If you were posting to a newsgroup that didn't permit such activity (there were some that encouraged/required it!), you might earn an angry email sent to your news administrator, who was generally connected to the authority structure (university or employer) and had little patience for your juvenile behaviour.
It worked really well.
...until it didn't! But I don't think this "problem" was a meaningful contributor to the decline of USENET.
Since NetNews had no central authority, every news server had to judge the validity of posts for themselves. And obviously they couldn't all know the moderator secret without it leaking immediately. Nowadays we'd have a moderator cryptographically sign the message contents. Actually this should have been possible back then too (RSA in 1977 plus a public key published in the newsgroup definition which already held the moderator email address?), but it was not used.
Newsreaders did not show the Approved header. People often stuck fun or funny stuff in there, like easter eggs for those who knew to look.
The FAQ hint was "it's moderated with no moderator". Everything else was up to you.
SMTP : Gmail :: NNTP : ???
Personally I think the (necessary) lack of binaries is why it would never grow beyond its niche.
Except whoever made Google Groups (and bought out and shut down DejaNews for it) got their promotion and lost interest and so Usenet For The Unwashed Masses got nixed like so many other Google products.
I think this is the elephant in the room that most "resurrect usenet" proposals ignore. Usenet hosting has coalesced around huge providers because the volume of binaries traffic presents a significant challenge, namely that you need beefy, expensive server infra to manage the traffic and retention.
The "next big thing" after Reddit won't be a plain text-only service. HN and Tildes already serve this niche. So any proposal for USENET 2.0 must provide a treatment of the bandwidth/data retention issue.
Sonic's ditched their NNTP servers as they move from being an ISP to a web provider, but back in the day they provided their own NNTP servers and included a Supernews subscription.
I think the "trust" back then was really just because only people with a certain amount of money could afford a computer and internet access. Most people on the internet at that time were middle class folk with proper day jobs, or in my case, a child of the aforementioned.
Back then it was mostly text and files were much smaller.
Now average image floating around is the size of a cheap USB stick.
The fact that we did that in the heydays of neoliberalism so we fumbled the ball into this current trainwreck will probably be part of the history in books written 200 years from now
At an interview: "OK, I see you worked for an oil company, right, and then a porn company, fine -- oh, you worked for a spammer. Sorry, we're done. I don't know how this happened, I'll need to talk to HR about their filters."
Trust me, lots of places would have issues with oil companies, others with porn and so one.
These types of restrictions in the real world are common. We don't permit say, people to set up shop running gambling tables inside of library reading rooms.
We have restrictions all around us like this. No picnicking on freeways, or say, hookers picking up Johns next to the paintings in the city art gallery. You can't just say, wheel in dirt to city hall and start tending a garden in the council chamber.
We decided to blow away all such equivalent restrictions on the web in the early 90s, being antithetical to any conventions. Maybe continuing to adhere to that, 30 years in, is not the best idea. Obvious guardrails, equivalent to no picnicking on the freeway, can be set up.
It's time to build more of a rules based online society
> heydays of neoliberalism
please explain.
Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism,[1] is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War.[2][3] A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them,[4][5] it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.
The libertarian fanboys on HN really don't like it because this is what they furtively shake their pom-poms for and it's clearly trending towards a socially net negative
These hands off approaches will get a thousand flowers to bloom but they'll mostly be weeds
But things that people with limited capital need? That obviously doesn't work. Look at the Cochabamba Water War or the California electricity crisis for good examples.
An unspoken rule of their models is all consumers value money the same and have an unlimited supply.
These assumptions fall flat on >99.5% of people.
But ruby and sapphire encrusted watches? fine! Game on.
I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.
It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.
ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.
> I don’t need any bill on my internet bill
I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.
Strictly speaking that’s not entirely true.
1. They could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service.
2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.
3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one.
4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. It would be untenable for all the reasons unmoderated forums are untenable, and also too unappealing to develop a Reddit-sized mass. The mods, for all the issues with Reddit’s mod community, are what make Reddit possible to continue to exist. You would need similar for any Internet social forum of a similar size, scope and user base and if that’s not the goal, plenty of niche forums already exist that you don’t need to get through your ISP.
> I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.
Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t have an issue with the billing arrangements I have with my ISP. I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. In an age of pervasive payment tech like Apple Pay, I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives.
I do still have the ISP-provided email address though, completely unused for the last 15 years and if they ever billed me separately for it, it would be terminated instantly.
Just as they could decide which websites you can visit, but, outside of government intervention, they normally don't. Similarly, they could limit which MX servers could connect to the ISP's MTA server, but they don't (not counting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC). Why would that be different for usenet?
> 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.
Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] case that the SCOTUS decided not to consider. The 9th US Circuit court ruled in favor of Reddit. Both Google and Twitter went through similar cases[2] and both prevailed.
Would usenet fare any differently?
> 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one.
I don't believe ISPs were ever considered common carriers[3] and this includes the period where usenet and email were commonly included with ISP internet access.
> 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation.
After Eternal September, usenet continued to function relatively well up till the time the attorney general of New York threatened to sue[4] a number of major ISPs over child pornography on usenet (which would be like a user's ISP being sued over the fact that they have child pornographic images stored in their ISP email account's inbox folder). This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their bundled usenet service which led to a significant reduction in the number of people connecting to usenet.
> I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them.
Your ISP provides DNS services you can use to allow your computer to determine what server to connect to when you initiate a HTTP request with your web browser. You could choose not to use them and have your computer connect to an external DNS provider. Similarly, you could choose to use your ISPs MTA and have your mail client connect to it and issue SMTP requests to send your email to whomever you wish. So, if your ISP provided a NNTP server for your NNTP client to connect to, you can still choose to use another provider to connect to usenet.
> I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill.
ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.
> Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives.
I don't really see having to use third party service providers for every single service as a superior alternative.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/politics/supreme-court-twitte...
[3] SllX ↗ 1. Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely. u801e ↗ > Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely. SllX ↗ > That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.
2. That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause, but Title I and Title II are different parts of the 1934 statute passed by Congress under which the FCC claims its legal authority, and who they regulate and how they may do so.
3. Briefly under the Obama administration until they were reclassified again under the Trump administration, but I addressed it because of what you said here:
> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.
Re: DNS
DNS is probably a core service. Yes there are third parties but if I had to supply my own DNS service, an Internet service provider would not be a very good Internet service provider seeing as how their core function is access to the Internet. I’d like to see how long an ISP would last without providing customers with a DNS resolver though, that could be fun.
> ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.
Telephone, cable, home security and various streaming services they either own or have relationships with. Comcast even has an MVNO. We don’t live in a world where most ISPs are merely ISPs and a lot of them repurpose that infrastructure to provide other services. We don’t have to talk about ISPs in a vacuum.
Also remember the original context of my first comment in this chain. I was responding to this:
> I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.
I’ve re-read that a few times and wondered if I misread the spirit of this text and whether I should have replied the way I did or not, but independent of whether I have or not, please read what I wrote with the appropriate context when you respond. I wasn’t addressing whether ISPs did something, I was addressing the appeal of being billed this way vs on my credit card without the additional layer of obfuscation.
Put another way: ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing. We have a million social networks and even communities with paid memberships. When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.
There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation.
That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.
> That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause
That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet. Given the widespread use of encryption, ISPs wouldn't be able to tell whether someone is using a service over HTTPS on port 443 or some other application level protocol using the same port.
Though if ISPs did place substantial limits in their bundled usenet service, then people would choose other ISPs or 3rd party services and/or complain. Just as they would if their ISPcs SMTP server wouldn't send messages to certain domains or if their web browser was blocked from accessing certain websites.
> DNS is probably a core service.
The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required. Discounting TLS certificate validation, I could connect to a remote server using their IP address instead of their hostname.
ISPs used to provide documentation instructing the end user how to connect to email, usenet, and how to set up their router or computer to access the internet. This could involve access credentials, DNS settings, etc.
> ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing.
Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.
> When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.
That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.
> There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation
Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.
I am not disputing the reason. You are correct about that. This is still an example of an enforcement action, or moderation, on the part of the ISPs. Just as an aside, that prosecutor was Andrew Cuomo.
> That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet.
No worries. And no, its repeal didn’t make much of a difference. If I’m remembering correctly, the Title II classification came in 2015 and this was undone in 2017, so not much time for the FCC to settle in and really do anything with their newly claimed powers over broadband service providers under Title II although it’s worth noting the drum beat of the pro-net neutrality crowd has been noticeably absent these past 5 years even with the change back which is certainly a change from prior to the Title II classification in 2015.
> The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required.
I was making a business observation, not a technological observation. An ISP could try to run their business like that. It would also not be a good idea if they intend to stay in business. Nobody signs up for an ISP expecting to BYODNS even though 3rd party DNS resolvers do exist (and I use one myself).
> Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.
That’s a personal choice. You can prefer that, but my argument against why I don’t is because I prefer as direct a billing relationship with my service providers as I can get. This offers me two things: direct insight into what every single line item on my CC statements is buying me and for what price, and also staves off the middlemen businesses that when they get too big for their britches more often than not try to exploit that status as the middlemen.
Often times middlemen are unavoidable or nearly so from an economic perspective in other contexts: a supermarket for example stands between me and the farmers. That relationship often gives them power over the farmers that can assist me in getting a known quantity in terms of item quality but may actually force producers to operate or behave a certain way. That’s meatspace though, literally and figuratively, but even in cyberspace given a choice, I prefer the direct relationship over the indirect one.
> That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.
As I stated above, I am not disputing the threat of a lawsuit. But if USENET was growing and a potential profit center for ISPs at that time, it would have been easier to make the choice to fight for it in court. A lawsuit isn’t a guaranteed victory for the one who brings it, but it wasn’t even worth defending to them, and in fact it had become a liability.
> Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.
As long as you are using someone else’s hosted service whether it’s AT&T’s pre-2008 NNTP services or Reddit in 2017 or Hacker News in 2023, your free speech rights are subject to the hosted service’s owners free speech and property interests. In a direct conflict on the service itself, yours loses. If it’s your server, then yours wins.
USENET in its heyday existed in a very different culture, legal environment and economy than today. USENET at only 1993’s scale can do just fine cultivating that same culture as before, but if all you want...
Back then yes. Today ISPs and Telcos are the literal definition of the word insidious.
So many examples of them selling user data to third parties without true consent.
Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)
ISPs also provided email accounts and I believe some provided a server directory for you to host your own website.
How expensive was Usenet if you took out storage/bandwidth for alt.binaries.*?
When the cost of storage and compute isn't really borne by the users, content limits are just challenges to overcome.
Maybe if there was a total messages or bytes limit per user it might prevent using it for binary distribution, but those are painful for users to the degree it might kill usage enough to kill any hope of it continuing.
sharing of binaries will always happen. even if it's just to include a cat image (we all know that's not all, but just sayin).
I'd be completely fine with a Usenet type of protocol that disallows file attachments altogether, adoption might not be huge, but maybe that's fine - projects like Gemini and Mastodon are valuable for me even if they're not replacing the WWW and Twitter.
The only way you can stop binary usage is if you limit the demand, as if there's demand the supply will find a way.
If you charge for transit on news server connections, people will naturally gravitate towards using it for lower size messages, which means they will go to unmetered connections for large downloads. Then not including alt.binaries in our server is less likely to have people looking for and utilizing methods to still get binaries through your service in different ways.
Theres huge differences in outcome based on how you attempt to limit demand. None are perfect, but just opting out of carrying binaries is the equivalent of the drug war, where they make the materials and transfer of them illegal. I'm not even sure how to stretch the metaphor to what I'm talking about, because the national policy on drugs and the drug war seems like a very poor fit.
A good metaphor might be the postal system. The old news system was like if the post office didn't charge per message or weight, just a flat monthly fee. Removing alt.binaries is like the post office then said they don't want you shopping g anything over 50 lbs because it's clogging all the delivery vehicles shipping large things. What I'm proposing is them giving you a total cumulative weight allotment per month you can't go over (or you get charges a lot). Demand will obviously respond to that, and people will opt for other methods to ship heavy things.
I mean, expensive by the standards of 1994, but -- inevitable comparison inbound -- a Raspberry Pi 4 has more CPU, more IOPS, more storage, and more RAM than many a 1994 small-ISP Usenet server. And modern Linux is a heck of a lot nicer to work with than any of the OS back then. A T1 is 1.5Mb/s, and if you don't take binaries, you would not quite fill that pipe back then.
These days, a $10/month VPS is not merely adequate, but luxurious for a non-binaries feed.
Famously so. "This message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars."
What if, and this is based on the principle of making it cost something, crypto got incorporated into the idea effectively forcing one to pay to send a message on a given forum.
Hardly perfect, but with one of the anonymous coins it might not be a bad balance ( assuming we can get past the current slew of news that battered crypto ).
I genuinely think that the current inheritors of Usenet are private group chats; trust based, relatively small groups.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Eh, not exactly ;) There was (and probably still is where needed) an elaborate system of killfiles being exchanged among trusted nntp servers. Also, you might want to look up the origin of the word spam:
> The first time that the word ‘spam’ was used in this sense actually arose from an innocent-enough affair. In 1993, Usenet administrator Richard Depew was responding to a discussion group, but he accidentally posted 200 duplicate responses to the board.
(from https://www.mailcleaner.net/blog/spam-world-news/whats-the-o...)
edit: this psa brought to you by drinking half a beer
We don’t need a lesson about eternal September either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam
In my .edu world the most annoying part of email was “chain mail” in which each recipient was threatened with bad luck or similar if they didn’t forward it on to three others. Email loops caused by .forward files were fun too.
Spam started on Usenet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
There's always these bright eyed and bushy tailed asses who can spot a clean pond to shit in.
Make a buck making everyone else's life worse, tough shit. What are you going to do about it?
Added: to expand, Usenet was and is mostly unmoderated. There were a few groups that wanted or needed moderation, and for those, workable methods came into existence.
Mostly, anonymity is good: https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan
Setting up such a network might be profitabel (lots of people spend quite a bit of money networking), but it is also going to be very expensive and you are going to get a lot of negative press from people whom you didn't accept and from people who will point out that you are discriminating against certain groups because your user demographics over or underrepresents certain groups.
It is never a nice job to be the one who has to man the walls, and it is not glamorous, but no Constantinople without the Theodosian Walls.
Wasn't that sort of included in your Internet subscription?
Even if not, why not use the same model as Internet subscription, where the payment comes from the fee you pay to your ISP? This would also make it easy for governments / donors to sponsor participation in such groups as they wouldn't have to hunt down individuals to provide them with a tiny amount of money, rather they could compensate ISPs directly.
A lot of ISPs are trying to make some extra $ by selling all sorts of junk, like anti-virus or w/e. Sure they wouldn't be opposed to sell an extra service, should it become popular enough.
Server<->Server communication requires technical chops to manage attacks at different levels of the protocol stack. So very few or no individuals today can run “news” servers. But organizations - that is entirely still possible. Most likely universities and companies that you might see represented at IETF meetings and protocol working groups.
Other than recreating the old Usenet, there is also the possibility of localized wireless (including LoRaWAN) communications networks. These could optional gateway to a global backbone even a UUCP-like store and forward one.
IMHO, the challenges are at least two fold - how to marshal the resources to sustain such a network and how to make it resilient against hostile attacks/deliberate blockage by gatekeeping
I don't think there is a simple solution people could just move to.
Exaggerating… a little bit
Hugs are worth more than handshakes.
There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model.
If HN had some internal-economy model where you were cycling around karma as if it was currency, paying upvotes into new posts to get a return back for your “early upvoting” if they do well, giving you more capital to spread to other new posters… I know exactly how the dynamics of this site would change for the worse. People just post here (free work!) because it’s interesting. How irrational!
There’s some merit to the idea that you need aligned incentives. I’ll give you that. Just doesn’t always need to be directly boiled down into units of exchange.
Yes, because those incentives can't be reduced to numbers, which is the only thing the economists, bean counters and ambulance chasers, among other professions, can even understand, let alone employ, in their models.
Reductionism at work.
The reason why the internet was functioning on trust was because it had economic arrangements powering it in a more invisible sense: the market demand was for more access to content, not higher quality of content. But we're really facing down the final conclusion of that with AI-generated spam. It can be encoded as hours of 8k video with the photorealistic likenesses of multiple celebrities, your spouse, parents and children all speaking to you: it will still be spam. Either the content has some kind of market price or carrying cost on it or we are willing to be elaborately lied to forever.
This isn't even a new issue to economics - the transition from free to regulated markets tends to be precipitated on the demand side by a desire for quality(safe food, air, water etc.) even if the regulation itself is ineffectual.
Blockchains are expensive in terms of data quantity, but they do get at certain parts of the issue; someone who elects to post content through one is signalling way above the noise floor, and it's only biased in that it self-selects to people who own some of that token(which does not necessarily lead to a one-to-rule-them-all billionaire's dystopia - precisely the opposite, it's relatively easy in a technical sense to spin up a small and short-lived chain and hand out some free tokens if you only need a little bit of security for a limited period of time, but that's not a framing we've normalized).
Every social problem can be legitimately solved by throwing more money at it[1]. That is, effectively, an economics model.
Corollary: Every economic solution can be improved by removing blockchain from it :-)
[1] Sometimes you have to throw the money at people who will spread your solution, sometimes you have to throw the money at media to spread the solution, sometimes you have to throw the money at campaigning, etc.
What?
That famously didn't work with covid.
> That famously didn't work with covid.
I was being haha-serious, not completely serious.
The response to "we threw money at $FOO and it didn't work" is "You didn't throw enough money at $FOO".
[PS. which country threw money at the COVID problem and had worse or the same results?]
...
Like NoSQL some time before that, and GPT / "AI" nowadays.
I say this isn't new because on the desktop in the 1990s, both Apple and Microsoft's dev platforms included some form of "object storage" based around their respective OLE/COM systems[1] and before then in the 1970s and 1980s it was people building business-systems on AS/400 (going back to the System 360...) where too many people never had a clue how to persist data on-disk (which was the whole impetus for Codd's paper, after-all) - so I think the 2000-2010 years where PHP+MySQL was dominant - and where most of us cut-our-teeth - was the exception: SQL is hard, relational theory is harder, relational calculus is harder-still (I think I got a B grade in that course...).
Non-experts have a very reasonable expectation that platforms should make it straightforward to save and load structured data without needing to spend a year of CS spending hours on exercises about functional-composition, surrogate keys, and decomposing tables to their 6th Normal Form - the embarrassment here isn't the non-experts you might think I'm dunking on, but it's the opposite: I'm very disappointed in the experts: the database-vendors and the platform-vendors, that they haven't solved the object-graph persistence library design problem.
------------
[1]: OLE/COM was for more than just composition, embeddeding Excel worksheets in Word documents and GUI design-tools: COM/OLE also featured a binary object structured storage API ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage )
That the blockchain "brand" has been (irrevocably?) damanaged by fools and charlatans doesn't invalidate the potential of using economic-incentives to solve problems: both technical and societal.
I still think that holocratic/syndicated moderation is worth trying as a social experiment. I also still think that centralized moderation as a single source of truth is the meta-debate in online spaces.
However, since the wind is gone from the crypto-sails, I don't think it's practically viable over short and medium timescales.
Well, I doubt many people would argue against that.
The blockchain arguments weren't really about that, though. They were about whether or not a specific mechanism (blockchain) was an appropriate one to achieve that.
My hypothesis is that an LLM would actually do a pretty good job at moderation, but only if the community didn't know it was an LLM doing the work.
Moderation is really just applied sentiment analysis, which is an area LLMs are quite strong in. However, as soon as the community learned it was an LLM doing the moderation, it would be torn to pieces by people abusing it.
On top of hallucinations, it's one of the major problems preventing many LLM usecases going into production; They are inherently vulnerable to hostile input.
Edit: oh yeah, obviously it is. The character talking is Scott McCloud's character, and it's titled "I can't stop talking" and Scott's webcomic at the time was called "I can't stop thinking".
In fact they must be replies to these posts (comics) from June 2001 about micropayments:
https://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-5/icst-5....
https://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-6/icst-6....
I guess attention spans have shrunk or I’m less tolerant of another ‘some guys opinion’ now they are spouted at me 24/7 or it’s the fact that there’s more than six webcomics to read.
Can’t imagine this comic being very successful nowadays.
Having said all that he was being mocked contemporaneously so it’s not just me!
Didn't work as a solution for that either.
that was then, now we can use a llm to moderate automatically, or even better, instead of a new internet community--with all the trouble that entails-- we could all just talk to chatgpt forever.
[0] = https://solidproject.org/
2) A decentralized usenet like you're describing is an email list with an archive.
3) Absolutely not. you're describing realID and Facebook.
4) Absolutely not you're describing the powermod problem that ruins all of these larger forums.
and since you seem a little unfamiliar with it's history, you should look up ARMM
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARMM_(Usenet)
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/ARMM.html
Its the opposite of an open platform to rank people by the same social media stuff that OP is saying doesn't work because it still wants a centralized form of reputation.
You can't resurrect the old usenet the way OP is talking about because he doesn't know what usenet was.
Why do we favor content from anonymous identities that disrupt the flow—-is a big question running as mods for communities.
would authy or okta be better? they for sure require an email address.
would a decentralized usenet that requires me to be bob jones/125 nonce st/cleveland be better for me the user or.. whatever the hell this proposal is?
Why should I send my passport or birth certificate to some random server on the internet?
fighting spam is an issue that I addressed in my first comment.
I meant to say, why don’t we build social media on top of email? It’s a protocol we already use for everything.
https://lists.riseup.net/www/
One issue is that many email providers aren't really maintaining their system and can't always reliably send mail in the ways needed for spam tracking, even though DMARC is over a decade old at this point. The large providers seem to randomly classify mail as spam at times, which also doesn't help.
I've been thinking that an email client focused forum might work well, where you effectively get a new account for a particular site that can only be used to send "email" within the forum, but you can acess the list over IMAP/JMAP or webmail on the site. This also means you don't need to have an existing email account that you don't mind the address being public, although on the negative side it would attract a bunch of spam that would currently be filtered out by most email providers. Additionally, there could often be a small privacy loss contacting a particular server for messages (the server sees the times you check for messages similar to visiting a website but unlike real email), although I think many email providers can pull messages from IMAP on a schedule (but then you get the random spam classification issues again). Moderation and anti-spam tools and notification options are the main issues I can think of with this idea and would need some work.
The closest thing currently that I know of is public-inbox, which it sounds like it will expose archives over IMAP among other options, but not in a way that lets you post.
https://lwn.net/Articles/748184/
So my idea is basically an alternate front end for email that would act as a social media platform.
Spam theoretically could be handled by filtering out any messages that aren’t from a list of users, which might be all platform users, verified users, or users within the network of the recipient.
Reliably seeing all messages that your friends and family (or anyone you follow) post would be a big advantage vs many current social media sites but regular email providers would defeat that by randomly sending messages to spam (which you could fix if you provide the client) or rejecting or disappearing them (which you can't).
I think an email provider that aimed at the "keeping in touch with friends and famnily" side of social media might be able to do small-scale well. I think a big part of the issue with email is that most of the end user providers seem to view email as something they must provide but not something they care about, only the marketing/transaction email providers actually care about it with few exceptions (and those exceptions seem to still be stuck in the past; it is depressingly difficult to find a provider with a reasonable set of features even based on what could easily be provided today).
By far much less monetization or ads so far less SEO spam (and so less need for moderation and/or spam filtering), minority of population so not much political campaigning aside from personal conversations about the topic, more technical people etc.
Just need someone to curate repository URLs.
If you want good content, you need to invite users who are known for insightful informative comments.
Except the people Microsoft unpersons.
If a problematic user on Reddits r/news gets banned (spam or whatever), there are admin-level bans that can ban that user at a global level. Allowing unrelated moderators on one subreddit indirectly-help moderate on other subreddits.
Shared global identity across the network is key. We can't have sockpuppets spamming one subreddit (or USENET group), and then have to be individually dealt with group-by-group. These sorts of moderation efforts must be shared.
Mastodon's model is to have servers responsible for their users. I'm not convinced that this model scales well, especially into the future as servers grow less trusting of each other.
---------------
IMO, what is needed is a DNS-like solution for identities, and proving your identity. Not a real identity mind you, but a pseudo-anonymous identity that has enough trust that people know you're not a spammer.
Yes, modern sockpuppets can pay a 3rd-world country to create innocuous accounts en masse and get around this, but we need to be at this level (or better). Without this level, we're back to just automated account creation bots spamming our servers with spam.
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This DNS-like identity management server needs moderation decisions to be shared. Not necessarily trusted mind you, but shared enough so that "Moderators over in X-location believe this identity to be spam". Or "Moderators over in Y-location believe this identity to be a troll".
EDIT: Other messages, like "Starting on June 2023, it appears that X-identity has been compromised and is now a spammer. Ban messages after this. Starting in July 2023, it appears X-identity has regained control of their identifier and we can stop banning their messages." Lots of useful moderation messages that need to be shared.
Maybe its up to individual communities whether or not "troll" or "spam" classifications of identities (or if the moderators at Y-server should be trusted at all: maybe a hostile group of moderators start putting up fake complaints about masses of users that they don't like). Etc. etc.
-----------------
But the overall goal is to create a mechanism where moderators are sharing effort and working together. Reddit accidentally provided that, and that's why it was better than USENET. That's probably the only incremental improvement that mattered in the long run.
I'm aware of the problems with CGNAT and v4, but [TEMPORARILY, as a cooldown!] banning IPs does work. With as many people as there are on the internet now, it's surpassed the ability of a handful of moderators anywhere to deal with. AI is too expensive and the first solutions are just going to involve everyone piping every comment, post and submission through OpenAI for free training anyway. At some level OpenAI will be perversely incentivized to hire spammers to drive business for themselves by pushing sites past free-tier usage.
Collateral damage may well be the solution to curtailing abuse in the future. For IPv4 for the most part, only individual users' IPs should be affected unless they're part of a botnet, but when nobody can use any site because trolls have gotten entire telcos' IPv4 space banned, at some point the trolls are going to have to accept what their impact is and change their behavior because other trolls are impacting their own ability to enjoy anything. Socialize the abuse and crowdsource punishment (not normally my thing, but we've tried everything else). If you shit where you eat, expect shit in your next bite. When someone brags about pointless mischief, rather than being cheered on as some kind of rebel, they will get a lesson in socialization. They will be outed as the reason why nobody in their country can access 4chan anymore and be dealt with.
This doesn't work while we exempt M247's address space because "normal" users insist on using the same infrastructure as trolls and cybercriminals, exempt all of Tor because there might be a gay user in Iran who can't keep their mouth shut, or refuse to block the IP of a problem user in the Philippines because it's shared by everyone in Malaysia. Accommodating exceptional people (no sarcasm, in the kindest terms) has made things exceptionally insufferable for everyone else.
This will drive fragmentation. It is a good thing. If one person can get all of Malaysia banned from Reddit 2.0 or whatever, after everyone is denied for long enough it will drive creation of smaller, local communities instead of massive, centralized ones. This is what we want, right? The most dedicated troll would have to do actual work to find, infiltrate and harass every single offshoot community that develops as a result. The cost of trolling is now borne by the troll, not the responders. It also increases the cost and effort involved in surveillance. Right now, if you want to track anyone, start with a FAANG product and work outward.
Within a generation, we became afraid of punishing anybody for any reason, so small wonder the lunatics are running the asylum. The internet fucking sucks these days. It feels like a mental hospital-- sterile, boring, with crazies everywhere screaming all the time threatening to kill everyone or themselves. Basically downtown Atlanta after hours, just with less piss flowing everywhere. If we want the old internet back, play by old internet rules. IP addresses are just numbers, ASNs are not people and the women are all men. Don't accept traffic from problem sources. Ignore the complaints unless they're from people helping to pay your hosting fees.
Nope. My identity, as a concept, doesn't change if I'm at Burger King, Starbucks, at home, or at work, or if I'm using a cell phone, or my Sister's computer.
Emails are the closest thing we have to a proper global identity. But it wasn't enough in practice. Reddit gives us a "Reddit" identity across a huge number of subcommunities.
Tumblr, MySpace, Xanga, Discord, Twitter, Facebook... the primary "killer app" that all of these give us is this identity.
Emails are insufficient, because a spammer can create any email address they want, and there's no way for us to share which email addresses are spam with other "allies" on the internet.
Of course, emails are also insufficient because people don't want to use them as their identifier across sites which is why your account email is private on every social platform and only used for internal notifications and forgot-my-password.
People don't want a global identifier that connects every utterance they have across the internet with the same identifier they, for example, send job applications from.
did:dns perhaps: https://danubetech.github.io/did-method-dns/
This is definitely not true anymore, but if I cite examples I will as always get flagged by people assuming I support said people/communities.
The age of being able to say whatever you like online is dead when your ability to even host your own site can be removed.
If it's political, you can still post it to alt.politics on usenet and not have any issues with any central authority.
You can say whatever you want on servers you control, just as you always could.
You can't post obscene or extremist content on other people's mainstream platforms, but that's always been the case. Reddit / Twitter / etc are really no different from AOL / CompuServe / etc decades ago in this respect. The difference is that the former are now orders of magnitude larger than the latter ever were, so it feels more painful to give those audiences up.
It's a cliché, but you're not entitled to an audience, and you're certainly not entitled to Reddit's or Twitter's audience, particularly if you get in the way of their corporate aims of serving mind-numbing ads over blandly inoffensive content to placid masses. You can now, as you could always, try to build your own audience. It won't be easy, but it never has been.
Increasingly not true, because you can never control all the services you have to use. Servers are one thing, but you still have to rely on ISPs, cert providers, payment processors, and all that other good stuff.
> You can now, as you could always, try to build your own audience
I'm not speaking of Reddit or Twitter, I'm talking about a fairly controversial website, Kiwifarms. That site is proof enough of what I'm claiming.
The internet isn't what it once was and the "create your own" argument ignores the realities of keeping a site online and accessible.
The past few years have highlighted some of the suboptimal machinations of our society, like collusion between government and media to silence domain experts who don't agree with a dominant political narrative[1].
The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want--the corollary is that I should be able to read whatever I want if it's being said. The relationship between me and people speaking is being manipulated, so, in that sense the ethos of free speech and the internet is broken.
The conclusion is that, no, in fact, you can't say whatever you want online. Saying that you can't guarantee an audience (without more context) makes your statement seem pejorative, as though the speaker feels entitled to an audience. The GP alludes to the free exchange of ideas, which your statement seems to ignore.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
According to whom? There are plenty of ways that has never been the case. In historical terms, its precedent was in enabling covert comms across large distances. In cultural terms, arguably its ethos is to facilitate the operation of the economy. In technical terms, its ethos is the segmentation and transmission of data. Insofar as you can even reasonably ascribe an "ethos" to machinery, in what avenue do you see this ethos of extreme freedom of speech? Because it sounds like you're saying a promise was broken that was never made.
It's disappointing I can not find such forums for all of my interests, but I muddle through and get by.
Obviously I'm a minority of 1, the populations of all these sites in terms of active, posting participants, is well south of 1000. Maybe south of 100...that's hard to say. I don't know how much reach these sites have in terms of lurkers watching us old folks quibble, but some of them are well known in their genres or communities (both geographical and internet-wide).
The Fediverse is the closest thing we have now. It's not perfect but it's ours.
m15o has built a ton of examples along these lines. There are other communities and tools too, loosely referred to as the "small web"/"smol web"
https://lipu.li/?u=m15o&p=projects
https://runyourown.social/
https://github.com/cblgh/cerca
Reddit and discord sucked in and destroyed a whole lot of phpbb.
I think Digg did it worst.
They all kind of exist, but they were mostly supplanted by bigger, more centralized things. All of them had a part in their own demise, too.
Then in turn those bigger, more centralized things have tended to screw things up.
To be sure, this doesn't mean proclaiming decentralization to be cool necessarily (...fellow kids), but trying to be open-minded and friendly to the public, which I consider to be the actual better part of the ethos of the early Internet era. Being tech literate is "esoteric" by itself, and some complexities and social contracts cannot be really taken away from that, not without going back under the centralized yoke. But even moreso we should be trying to make it a little better by our attitude.
Even if a regulation of protocols for utilities will come, assuming it will be good, we need society to remain willing to preserve it.
It's like cloud-hosting email: everyone wants to not host their own email server, but then you're at the mercy of the service provider. For most people its worth it... until it isn't.
"Big" spaces are important too. Maybe more important if we're trying to avert global disaster.
The problem for me (and you) is that I'm not in it. The problem for a high school student who just wants to learn is that he's not allowed in either. The problem for most of the world is that the great insights within this community are forever hidden.
Perhaps small communities could nominate generally useful conversations and have them released as blog posts. At least then people could watch from the outside, while the community still remains small and private (not everything would be published).
This, maybe less formally but no less in practice, was unironically the killer social feature of Google Reader.
That's why Reddit and Discord are so successful. You can create your small community for close to zero cost and zero technical expertise, no one is going to pull the plug on the server because the one guy responsible for it didn't pay the bill, if the server in question is not an old PC in somebody's basement with no backup.
Even with good tools, building a community server still relies on an individual or a small subgroup to make an investment in money and time for the entire community, and if they stop doing so and no one wants to take over, the server is gone. On a platform like Discord, as long as there is any one person in there, it will continue running, the platform keeps the community accessible and does basic administration like spam filtering for free, even when there is no one to care, it can do that because it pays itself on user access, though premium membership and ads.
Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge these are problems. But I have so little faith in big platforms these days that I don’t really see an alternative.
USENET had many excellent corners as well as places where you could witness or, if desired, participate in, full-on fecal matter throwing contests. Not sure why people think it was some idyllic environment different from anything seen today.
The key thing to understand is that people are pretty much the same. The masses have some really unique personalities that seem to come out and flourish in front of a keyboard.
I used to think that anonymity was the culprit. It obviously isn't. I have seen some awesome (not in a good way) feces throwing contests on Facebook in groups devoted to our neighborhood and town. In other words, people who are not at all anonymous and very likely run into each other and even send their kids to the same schools.
Mark Twain's observation still holds true today:
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”
I was fairly late to the game, but by the time I was on usenet, it was _mostly_ full of spam and flamewars, with only a few "moderated" groups being of value. (And even those tended to be populated mainly by, shall we say, "outspoken" individuals.)
Even Reddit shows this, with the default (the ones you get if you don't login) subreddits being a sea of trash but a lot of value to be found in the more specialized subreddits.
I'd start with the basic idea that identities matter. For any given message, you should know what user posted it and from which server. It doesn't matter if the user is Robert Smith posting from smith-family-server.net, or Leet Hakkerman posting on darkweb.io, every message should be signed by the author ("the person who owns this public key wrote this) and counter-signed by the server ("my user, who owns this public key, did indeed submit this message to me"). Separating out individual identities (user's key pair) from the server means you can switch to another server and say "hey, it's me, i'm over here now" and it's verifiable -- but of course requiring people to manage key pairs is a tall ask.
Once you've got that, you can start doing things like setting up your server to just drop any messages from a server you consider abusive, or configuring your newsreader to drop messages signed by a particular user. "Nymshifting" is still possible, but it takes the cooperation of a server owner to do it, and it means the server might find others unwilling to peer with it.
Ideally, as people proposed with Mastodon, servers should be small; the admin should never answer "who??" when you mention a user on their system. But like a lot of decentralization/federation ideas (see Mastodon), these schemes fall apart quickly as soon as the usual thing happens: one server goes up which makes registration easy & anonymous, thousands of users flock there, and everybody else has to decide if they want to drop the server which generates 50% of traffic on the network.
edit: part of the idea of making it look a lot like Usenet except that your servers are verifying signatures throughout is that you can just use regular existing newsreaders to read it. The servers might exchange messages in the "native" format via a slightly modified IHAVE command, but when a newsreader connects and asks for an article via the ARTICLE command, the server can parse & rewrite the article to present it in RFC1036-compliant format.
At first blush the curation signer looks the same as the server, but I think its subtly different in a way that is maybe effective?
A) You can re-curate or multi-curate a message, but you should (probably) keep the source community constant
B) It separates moderation concerns from on-topic concerns which is a constant struggle. Easy for a server to host many different communities/topics/communication mores and import the content stream in different ways from different curators
Who does the curation? I guess its as simple as the upvote button, but perhaps you can improve that model substantially
"modern concerns" go way past spam and spoofing.
Such as?
For the purposes of deciding who gets to communicate, and what is deemed worthy communication, no human being is trustworthy. Myself included. If we allow anyone to "run" it, then we will end up back where we are now in just 10 or 20 years. But each time we go through the cycle, the tyrants and busybodies and free speech minimalists and the other assholes learn a little more about how to oppress and strangle and bury and muzzle. And too many times through the cycle and I think they might actually perfect those skills.
The social part: the "internet scale" and the scale of "largest group who can keep meaningful relationships" are incompatible.
The economic problem: ad-based models have misaligned incentives. People can not vote with their wallets, so every content creator, media property or social media network defaults to the lowest common denominator. And the number of people willing to pony up the cash to help things happen are simply not enough to make it sustainable.
This is a good model if connectivity is scarce or expensive, but inefficient if it’s pervasive and cheap.
Starting to use Usenet again (since it hasn’t actually ever gone away) doesn’t really make sense. It is a product of a different set of preconditions.
The web is absolutely packed with data duplication, every CDN ever keeps a copy of everything in serves in multiple locations. There's nothing wrong with duplicating data. So long as there's some agreement on the uniqueness of a message it doesn't really matter how many times it's duplicated in the network.
It's actually an advantage because it means multiple parties can maintain backups of of messages and reconstruct conversations after the fact. If some central source of threads goes down it can be rebuilt from partial copies. It's the reason DejaNews even had extensive Usenet archives for Google to purchase.
It's kind of dead. IIRC the dev put that on the back burner in favor of a new BBS-like app. https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem
Does it? People have been free to communicate. They are still free to communicate via a different platform. There's no "risk" here. Those companies have investors who expect the companies to make money. Any different organization is going to sit there and expect to pull in enough to at least keep the lights on, but while people find it a worthwhile thing to donate to the Wikimedia foundation, I don't think you'll find that they'd do the same for Reddit 2.0.
> 1. There has to be a movement at both protocol and community-level to bring a Usenet like forum for general consumption. Different decetralized subgroups hosting and replicating the communities for others.
We HAVE Usenet. Maybe figure out why Usenet was abandoned by most people before replicating something that is broken and doesn't work for discussion.
> 2. The model needs to be rethought to ensure that the thoughts and knowledge of communities and users belong to them.
This is literally useless and so far down the list of concerns of users that it only makes sense to the exact kind of people that other people hate to encounter on forums.
> 3. These forums should encourage less anonymity and more persistent communication.
LOL.
> 4. Trustworthy individuals should run these forums, chosen by the community. Individual groups, academia, organizations running the communities but easily redistributed across to people who want it. This was usenet.
This is a lie. Unmoderated newsgroups absolutely thrived in the heyday of Usenet while the other groups withered on the vine because nobody wanted to deal with the steel-fisted asshattery that was Usenet moderation. Reddit moderation is light-years better than Usenet's ever was, and that's not even talking about the fact that Usenet was designed for an age when people connected to the internet 30 minutes a day and didn't have powerful, permanently connected computers in their pockets.
> Failure to address these issues allows mega companies to exploit data and control access against users' wishes.
Mega companies are going to exploit data and control access regardless of what else happens because there's value there.
> Taking action is crucial to prevent unfavorable outcomes and hold ourselves accountable.
Taking a step back and realizing that Usenet was an epic failure for discussion would be a good starting point.