111–120 of 235 posts
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My understanding is that "typical" Mastodon/ActivityPub instances limit you to on the order of 500. Certainly true for Fosstodon.
I never used the Fediverse, but is all/most trying to be a Twitter clone?
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The fact that copyright infringement works in spite of attempts to kill it seems to be proof that BitTorrent is well-designed, rather than evidence it's broken. What else would it be associated with? People do use it to distribute large datasets, but even those have fallen into the infringement category. And of course; good faith is all that we have here.
Ah, OK, you're one of those people. So, to rephrase things: because of you , Usenet is dead. And BitTorrent is dead. And any future technology anything like it will be dead-on-arrival, because you simply don't grok how the world works. And I'm very well aware that "the way the world works" is in direct conflict with "the way you think the world should be working", but that's the exact issue here. You are Eternal Sept…
My question was, how did you envision BitTorrent working?
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Is this a good-faith question, or are you truly not aware of the extreme scale of the copyright infringement that BitTorrent is used for? (And by that, I mean, that any BitTorrent use is automatically associated with excessive bandwidth usage and incoming legal threats, unlike, say, a usable P2P technology)
The fact that copyright infringement works in spite of attempts to kill it seems to be proof that BitTorrent is well-designed, rather than evidence it's broken. What else would it be associated with? People do use it to distribute large datasets, but even those have fallen into the infringement category. And of course; good faith is all that we have here.
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The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. Don't like the politics? You wouldn't have liked Usenet in its heyday either.
The organization of Fediverse is different, and availability of historical discussions is spotty. Also, some quirky usenet groups aren't available elsewhere, such as alt.binaries.*
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Binaries also forced the centralization of Usenet, so that regional ISPs had no incentive to do anything but outsource it. It was unbelievably annoying to host a full-feed Usenet server in the late 1990s, and if you hosted anything less than one, people would arrange boycotts; better not to host Usenet at all. Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original.
> Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original. Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods.
Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups. In particular, alt.* and *.binaries.* would be unavailable pretty much anywhere that had "cost of bandwidth" or "reputation" concerns.
And if you repeatedly posted abusive content to any Usenet group, you can bet that your account and/or entire site would be "cancelled" from the network pretty quickly by the infamous "Usenet cabal" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal). Not to mention that Usenet was the entire origin for the concept of the "killfile".
Finally, the most popular Usenet hubs (say, UUnet) were very much for-profit...
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The article links to a free Usenet provider. I'm sure there are others also. The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content. That was really one of t…
> The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content. This may reflect the state today, but back in the late 90's and early 00's, it was not. Even for th…
I played a few games of Tradewars on one of these a while ago. It sure brought back the days of being a sysop of my local BBS growing up.
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The spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight control, which is not a feature of usenet. One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read. Aggregators can occupy public keys as th…
It still does that.
So I just hopped on Usenet via eternal-september for the first time and checked some of the can.* boards to check in with my fellow countrymen. Wow, it's like I'm reading a collection of everyone's spam folder with some flares of racism for good measure. Is there _any_ moderation on Usenet? How do I get it? For now I think I'll stick to Mastodon (Canadians, join cosocial.ca co-op!)
I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers, etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary forums. I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.m…
sign up for a free Usenet provider Any suggestions?