301–310 of 330 posts
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The messages would be on a block chain. The crypto would fund the node provider.
What will be your reaction if your forum meets CSAM abuse? You can not even delete anything.
Users would have to operate on the older model of usenet - if you can't handle the heat don't go, or the node operator could simply ban the account.
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 tel…
Love to chat more on what are the possibilities, existing tools, and advancements needed on those.
Where can I find you on the internets?
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I meant per user monthly or weekly byte limits by the people running servers and allowing access, not message byte limits. I'm well aware of how usenet worked, and the fact they can just split into an arbitrary number of payload messages was the point I was making earlier in that comment. 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.
yes, limiting the demand has also always never worked. ask the war on drugs how it's doing on limiting the demand
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.
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Yeah you can easily host a phpbb or vbulletin or whatever still exists these days on a single dedicated server (ovh or hetzner) and be able to serve 100k MAU for about 50-75 USD/month. Hell, for less than 10k MAU you can still get away with shared hosting if you're really strapped for cash, 5-7 bucks per month. People around here really lost perspective of what can be accomplished with a dedicated box and a PHP forum…
Few people seem to need custom-run forums when a plethora of subreddits exists! It's the network effect: everyone interested will head there, because they know that everyone else interested will head there. It's relatively harder to make your forum even known among potential interested users on the background of the entire Web, while you have a much narrower search space within reddit.com. (Widely popular Facebook gr…
I'm in a carseat facebook group, and people constantly post engagement spam, I'm really not sure to what end, but I assume it somehow makes other facebook posts visible. Then there's the run of the mill scams that hit all kinds of networks.
"My Autistic Son loves 'Yamaha Boat Outboard Motors' and made these T-Shirt. Please take a look and let him know what you think, he loves comments~~~"
Then I get tons of youtube videos for topics that have all the keywords I need but are literally not even working on the same vehicle or problem I'm looking for, but of course you can't figure that out until 3 or 4 minutes into the video.
The few dedicated sites I'm still in that are active are far and away better than their reddit /facebook/ instagram /discord contemporaries. Though have still declined from the 2000s.
At least you can search reddit with google. Facebook you can't find anything, sometimes I can't even find the groups that I'm a member of.
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.
ServerServer 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
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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 ... Like NoSQL some time before that, and GPT / "AI" nowadays.
Those who have never read Edgar Codd's seminal paper on RDBMS are doomed to repeat the sounds-good-if-you-dont-think-about-it-too-much mistakes that NoSQL makes people sleepwalk into - and this will never end because database-theory is always an unpopular elective for CS undergrads (and a very dry, unappealing, subject-matter at that) - everyone wants to do Graphics or NLP or even Haskell instead - and if that's what…
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Those who have never read Edgar Codd's seminal paper on RDBMS are doomed to repeat the sounds-good-if-you-dont-think-about-it-too-much mistakes that NoSQL makes people sleepwalk into - and this will never end because database-theory is always an unpopular elective for CS undergrads (and a very dry, unappealing, subject-matter at that) - everyone wants to do Graphics or NLP or even Haskell instead - and if that's what…
Because I was curious and you didn’t link to it, here is A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks by EF Codd: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
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> Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. 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.
> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. 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 t…
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] https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/why-its-a-good-thing-that-bro...
[4] https://www.techdirt.com/2008/07/22/andrew-cuomo-threatens-t...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. 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 t…
> 1. [ISPs] could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service. 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…
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.
1) usenet was a kind of opt-in syndication that ran through uucp jobs that often went through whitelists at the local level, often over low bandwidth modems. pirate and other binary channels were frequently not rebroadcast. 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 proble…
And why don’t we just build stuff on top of email?
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.