51–60 of 235 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. For the most part, when people talk about "The Fediverse" they mean ActivityPub based sites. You could argue the point, since NNTP is "federated" as well, and one could certainly conceive of federating between the NNTP space and the ActivityPub space. I'm a Fediverse user, fan, and advocate (mindcrime@fosstodon.org), but I specifically mentioned Usenet, because th…
I’ve been very happy on the Fediverse (mastodon) since I took the plunge a few months ago. This is what the “early” internet at its best must have felt like. Real humans, technical discussions, random finds (painting!), sorted by created at desc.
Yes, having images available within mastodon is nice - that was always clunky with usenet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been very happy on the Fediverse (mastodon) since I took the plunge a few months ago. This is what the “early” internet at its best must have felt like. Real humans, technical discussions, random finds (painting!), sorted by created at desc.
It's not really like usenet, if only because of the character limits. This really changes the nature of the discussion. Yes, having images available within mastodon is nice - that was always clunky with usenet.
Technology choices inspired by nostalgia are not always the best bet, but if you're going all the way, I suggest a return to FidoNet Echomail.
http://ftsc.org/docs/fts-0004.001 should get you started, and I'm sure you'll figure out a way to make node assignments decentralized.
2:285/11.2 signing off. But I still have some bad C code implementing an Echomail processor, if you need it...
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It's not really like usenet, if only because of the character limits. This really changes the nature of the discussion. Yes, having images available within mastodon is nice - that was always clunky with usenet.
I’m on infosec.exchange, our limit is 11000 chars. That’s more than enough.
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…
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…
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.
Or just join an instance that is not explicitly political. You don't have to be on beehaw or hachyderm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you articulate the ways in which it seems not-a-social-network to you? Comparison with reddit might be useful. The only fundamental distinction I can draw is that there's no unified source of identity in usenet. All the rest of the differences come down to moderation policies.
Moderation policies matter a lot. The tech behind Usenet makes moderation much more costly than it is on anything commonly called a social network (and the people running Usenet are opposed to moderation of anything other than outright spam or so that's how it always was when I stopped paying attention about 15 years ago).
Easy comparison: Mastadon has distributed identity, and localized management of moderation. Is this sufficient that we should deem it "not a social network"? I think not.
I think there was no real consensus in USENET towards the appropriate degree of moderation, rather several standing waves of opinion. All the species of technically simple moderation patterns were present there: A species of subscriber, or every message approved (basically only a radically small set of approved posters) and so on. Since some of the newsgroups are functionally archives of mailing lists, there's a whole additional universe of moderation techniques applied "upstream".