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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?

#141

Post by giantrobot »

__d wrote: post #56

Usenet was designed with a model of sporadic connection. Every site had a copy of items in its subscribed groups, and would refresh them from its upstream servers periodically. 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 p…

> This is a good model if connectivity is scarce or expensive, but inefficient if it’s pervasive and cheap.

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.

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

#142

Post by dsr_ »

throw0101b wrote: post #112
myself248 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero […] How expensive was Usenet if you took out storage/bandwidth for alt.binaries.*?

Cheap.

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.

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

#143

Post by forgetfreeman »

hunter2_ wrote: post #15
joezydeco wrote: post #4

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 a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has…

I remember having to resort to submitting a post to alt.tech-support.recovery using a text editor and a raw telnet session due to the "lay-an-egg" requirement for posts to be accepted there and I didn't have software that would let me fiddle with headers in a sane fashion. HN most certainly does not achieve this level of filtration.

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

#144

Post by lproven »

USEnet is alive and well, thanks. It doesn't need resurrecting; it never died.

I have a free account on Eternal September:

https://www.eternal-september.org/

I use Thunderbird as my client. In T'bird >100 you get mail, including Gmail etc via oAuth, including calendar/contacts/tasks, you get News, and you get chat over Matrix. All in one app.

It badly needs spam filtering for its NNTP client, but it works a treat. Runs on Win/Lin/Mac just fine. Sync between instances is coming real soon now, MZLA claims.

I wrote about it:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/new_betas_of_firefox_...

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

#145

Post by hattmall »

cityofdelusion wrote: post #130
hattmall wrote: post #107

Why not just independent forum sites like 1998-2008. I was a member of 10 or so very specific forums where I could get expert advice very quickly. That is in the rare event that my problem hadn't already been discussed in great detail with highly detailed walk throughs. Then each of those forums had a marketplace where you could buy pretty much anything relevant to that interest at great values with scams being prett…

A ton of these forums actually still exist, especially for expert-level things. Reddit is great for memes and echo-chamber text content, but its awful for things like detailed guides on how to do some niche procedure on your old car or detailed discussion on niche things like the intersection of the latest in construction engineering on home performance and home DIY. A lot of these old forums (to this day!) even bubb…

Yes a couple of them I've been on are still around but quite a few are a shell of their previous activity and some have disappeared entirely. I think people, myself included, are too easily distracted by the quick hit proposition of sites like reddit and Facebook. I would spend a solid 20-30 minutes daily catching up on some forums without really encountering something of interest. It was more like watching a rerun of a favorite show. My actual dopamine generating activity was in real life putting the things I learned on the forums to use.

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

#146

Post by tannhaeuser »

joezydeco wrote: post #4

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.

> spam was unheard of

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...)

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

#148

Post by dsr_ »

Hyolobrika wrote: post #131
kristopolous wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right when the commercialization of the internet was permitted. 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

How would you forbid it?

You make it socially unacceptable to run a server that emits spam. You make it socially unacceptable to work for a company that emits spam.

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."

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

#149

Post by Sunspark »

dragontamer wrote: post #10
joezydeco wrote: post #4

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.

Except Reddit moderators deal with these spam issues all the time. 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 adm…

The reason Usenet can't work today is not for the reasons you surmise.

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.

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

#150

Post by ChuckMcM »

zilti wrote: post #91
ChuckMcM wrote: post #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 wh…

So basically you want the clients to store their data themselves? I actually thought about such a thing as well, but that would have severe performance implications, or require a DHT-like storage where stuff gets chopped up and replicated on a bunch of other clients, meaning those other clients would not only have to offer extra storage, but also experience a lot of bandwidth usage.

Yes. Although I don't see the performance issue. Random read, and serial write access to a 2TB NVME flash drive is really really fast. And I want to point out that back when Dejanews posted archives of the entire Usenet over several years worth it was a couple hundred megabytes of text data.

Remember that since it is only topics/people "you" the client choose to follow and/or post about it really isn't that much data. There are likely a zillion subredits you never read, and will likely never read. So your client never needs to fetch that data. If you get a referral to some data on separate thread in a separate "group" only that thread need be fetched/indexed, you may choose then to subscribe to that "group" and fetch both history and new posts but still it would be small.

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