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Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#71
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, they vacuum things up, but people have agency. They choose to use platforms. They can choose to use different ones. I can't influence every person's choices, but I can choose how I invest my time and social energy, and present an alternative for people who are alienated with existing platforms (a very large and growing population)

The problem is, a lot of the platforms that I've liked over the years have been vacuumed up. I still try to use different ones, but it's a lot harder.

Personally most my moves away from online platforms over the last 3 decades years have been been because community owners have massively fucked up.

I think Digg did it worst.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#72
post #7

Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.

I was one of those people.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#73

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless. 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.

The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#75
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to the root post, but I’m so glad that time is over. There was a ~1year period where it was nearly impossible to have a conversation about solving something that didn’t involve someone scheming about how to reframe the problem as an economic model, and then drown out everyone with some half-baked tokenomics concept as a way to “solve it all!”. It really felt like a step backwards in critical thinking for pe…

You forgot about obligatory "actually, using normal proper database would make that solution be far more simpler and faster", and impending silence from whoever proposed another blockchain garbage... or alternatively a slew of comments where the blockchain fanboy slowly learns how DBs work and how the fancy things in blockchain are possible without it for 30 years now.

“Wait… I’m seeing column constraints in this white paper for PostgresSQL you sent me… how do we make this trustless??”

Exaggerating… a little bit

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#76

How do you get the users? The third-party apps had the opportunity to collaborate and start with a massive userbase, but instead they choose to shut down. Odd.

Nothing odd about it. These apps are frontend; building a backend of a reddit scale is a completely different task.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#78

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless. 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 think I agree. There has to be a cost. I cuts down spam and raises a cost for mildly the mildly annoying.

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 ).

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#79
Yes. But you have to do it in the way that Usenet was built and you may not like that.

I was intelca!cem on Usenet. Modem charges (phone calls) weren't free outside the local calling zone, and places like Berkeley (ucbvax) were often "hubs" that could use university resources to move data over longer distances. Every node had all the data, so system administrators had to come up with schemes for what to delete and when. Even though it was "open" people regularly railed against "the cabal" which where the folks who essentially controlled the namespace so you want a new comp.sys. newsgroup, the cabal had to sign off on that or the other nodes wouldn't accept your postings to it. That fight spawned the "alt" tree and it allowed for an affirmative choice of "constrained" posts or "freeforall" posts. The "risky" groups distributed binaries, some of which were CSAM and some of which were pirated software. This lead to a lot of nodes not carrying them (easier than filtering out the bad stuff). For history, "pathing" was something like sun!ucbvax!intelca!cem which meant Sun sent things to ucbvax, and ucbvax would forward things to intelca. So if ucbvax decides not to "carry" a newsgroup, then no one down stream from them would get those newsgroups. (this lead to ISPs advertising "full" Usenet feeds in the 90's)

So what would a "modern" Usenet look like? Consider; Things that were expensive then (long distance and storage) are cheap now and things that were cheap then (class C subnets) but are expensive now. Usenet was hosted on netnews which was described by the netnew transport protocol or nntp. Just like the web is hosted on the hyper text transport protocol http. First and foremost a modern Usenet needs a modern foundational transport protocol. This would be IPV6 based (lots of available addresses) and end to end encrypted. You could implement this with carrier grade NAT or you could use tailscale. The latter is "easy" and a proof of concept would be easy to slap together. I think of this as engineering deliverable #1, a protocol for peer to peer newsgroup sharing with IPV6 addresses and end to end encryption.

From a cost perspective, that needs to be born by the user. Fortunately people already pay for their Internet access and computer(s), so really it just requires dedicating a computer to be your "node" in the hierarchy.

This gives us engineering deliverable #2, a repository of name to address mappings. While this could easily be provided by a bespoke DNS with its own set or root servers. The limitation and risk of third party DNS servers is well known. In 1990 I designed a system for NIS+ which allowed clients to start from zero trust and an introduction to a "server" they could trust, to allow for elaborating trust across a much larger network. It was implemented by a brilliant engineer (a guy name Kamal Anand) who created a cache service for keeping a credential cache of trusted servers. The advantage of such a system is that "who you trust" is something you get to decide, and you can decide not to trust servers that others trust or to trust servers that others don't.

Engineering deliverable #3 would be a core "server" which exchanges information with other servers it trusts, posts that it has seen that others have not, and presenting posts it receives to others once it receives them. It has functions to list posts, and to work with a client to change visibility rules (read/unread subscribed/unsubscribed etc). I will admit that one of the areas where looking at how gmail was implemented most impressed me was the idea that messages were the "general ledger" and folders, state, Etc. were just labels on the transactions. This works really well because delivery can be one linear write to a single blob, with individual "messages" and their attachements by addressable content into that blob. So the indexes stay small, the messages could be written to write-once optical media if you wanted.

Engineering deliverable #4 is a client, that authenticates to "your" server from any connection point on the Internet (remember I said tailscale makes this super easy), that runs on any of your devices (phone, tablet, laptop), and allows you to interact with the service; list, read, write, delete, classify posts.

I believe the key to financial success here is that the only "cost" to host this service is equivalent to running a dozen DNS server instances. All the hardware, storage, and connectivity costs are born by the client through systems they already pay for. As a client you could choose to trust a mapping server or maybe trust the server your friend is using with a choice to trust whomever that server trusts.

Finally, you would have to accept that in all likelyhood you and your buddies would be the only "cool kids" on this service for the first couple of years of its existence. Lots of muscle memory out there for existing sites (reddit et alia) and so a lot of "oh I read that on neuvoUsenet you probably didn't see it" experiences. Investing in outreach to specific groups would benefit things greatly.

The bottom line is that I consider this both a good idea and technically doable but it is a labor of love at present, it is by design difficult to monetize.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#80
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear you might be right. But somehow, HN is a counter-example? 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?

The average person has no idea what 90% of the headlines on HN are even referring to, giving it a degree of self-moderation.

And the average person also doesn't know the website exists. You have a few layers of public knowledge:

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!

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