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

> 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.

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.

As an expert in the field of content management and process management I've been considering what would make a better replacement for Reddit and similar social networks for years.

I was deeply involved with Usenet back in its heyday, having creating multiple channels there, and have also written multiple ECM systems for major companies. Obviously used IRC extensively also. Also YIM, ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc.

What I can tell you is that Usenet does not address some of the core needs. The core needs are:

1. A persistent identity system ( Usenet sort of accomplishes this by email but it is insufficient; these days it can/should be done through public key encryption )

2. Anonymous central authority also accomplished via a key. This central authority will only be tasked with maintaining a list of the current approved servers that form the distributed set of nodes. Anonymity is necessary here to prevent various governments from attempting to restrict what nodes are allowed and what software is run on them. If a server appears to be running modified software in any way it will get banned from the network.

3. Moderation with mods per community. This is pretty crucial to prevent topics/channels etc from devolving into chaos. The central authority should also identify which nodes handle which channels/topics, and it should be possible for some to decide to run all their own secure nodes ( possibly to even charge for membership / access to it )

4. Automation. This was accomplished on Reddit via API and bots that acted with moderator power. In a new system this should be more integrated into an adjustable pipeline letting posts be vetted through a custom algorithm determined by the channel.

5. Structured content. Being able to create different types of posts with a structure to them that get fed through templates for display/interaction is very useful. One minor example is polls. There is a wide variety of different types of posts that should be supported, and many more types than Reddit ever provided should exist. I haven't seen any existing system doing what I am imagining here. This ties deeply into ECM and process management systems.

A new system is needed and has been needed for years. The main issue is that few people understand how to create something truly innovative that is better than what exists. Of those who understand how, even fewer have the ability to get one up and running and stay running long enough to establish a hold on the market. Doing so is not cheap.

If people are interested in collaborating on making such a system as an open source project, I would be happy to help guide the work. I would want it to start as an analysis of the existing alternatives to Reddit and analyze the abilities provided by all the various existing systems first. Until it is well understood what exists and whether one of the existing things is viable, it would be foolish to engage in attempting to make something better.

The system I am envisioning is one that simultaneously allows complete freedom and anonymity but also allows moderated communities with rules and verified identities. These are different needs but both are required if we want to address the needs fully.

There seems to be real need for a public digital infrastructure that Reddit and Twitter satisfied. I believe they're largely the same thing, as both enable threaded discussions in a tree structure. Twitter of course is famous for its character limit, but this just leads people to create endless threads. And that limit has been softened at least twice.

We don't give important infrastructure into the hands of single corporations (at least not without massive regulation) for a reason, so it should be similar here.

But as we all know and have seen from Mastodon, federated solutions suffer from multiple issues:

* moderation

* spam

* infrastructure

* discoverability

* ease of onboarding

* deleting content

I believe that the governments have to ease at least some of this. They build streets, canalisation, and so on, because we deem it essential. So they should at least provide some of the hardware for our digital town square.

So maybe something like usenet, a network of nodes that synchronize where at least some important nodes are run by governments.

The other points appear to be hard problems though.

[flagged]

The obvious solution would be to build something with git. Put markdown-files with usenet-headers in a repo, define some proper behavior for automated merge-requests and host it on the git-forge of your choice. This solution would out of the box remove most friction for growing and makes a huge amount of tooling and knowledge availabe, while people could focus on the important parts of building good clients and other userspace-tooling. And in case it becomes actually successful, you could still improve performance.