171–180 of 330 posts
https://freenet.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/ https://getaether.net/ I think Freenet/Locutus contracts that work like forums on Aether (with auditable moderation and elections) would be neat.
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…
FYI Yggdrasil https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ already gives you a unique, stable IPv6 with mesh layer encryption for your packets.
Likewise a DHT for "subreddit" or topic identity (or even a blockchain for that as naming is one of the few things that can be solved with a blockchain, though as always there are tradeoffs) shouldn't be too hard to build as a lot of the ingredients (Kademlia, GNS, IPFS, IPNS, etc) already exist.
I suspect the hardest part will be building the product experience around this whole system. The tech is mostly there. But if you want to enable non-technical people to use it, you have to make the system simple and clear to use, which a lot of technical people (myself included) struggle with.
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We have global identities-- IPv4/6 address. v6 moreso than v4. 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 thr…
> We have global identities-- IPv4/6 address. v6 moreso than v4. 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, Xang…
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.
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…
We don’t need a lesson about eternal September either.
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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.
I am very curious but my search-fu has failed me. What was the requirement? Is there a link or jargon file or something I could read? I love this kind of stuff. 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.
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. Ru…
As an analogy a lot happened to HTTP and other protocols to increase user experience, better content deliverability, and control.
Can this be done to a modern NNTP protocol?
My nostalgia for the ancien internet is deep and abiding, but it does not extend to actually wanting to use Usenet again. Usenet was never a good solution, it was just the only solution for a long time. So, to the extent that the proposition is for something that is Usenet-like, my vote is no. If you're saying "should there be a better, decentralized Reddit that is not garbage like Usenet" the answer flips instantane…
I find that this nostagia is mostly to who was on that internet, rather than tech at the time. 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.
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 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?
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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…
>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 ... Like NoSQL some time before that, and GPT / "AI" nowadays.
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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…
What about critcoin: a block chain based smart contract that incentivizes critical thinking.