5 ms·

If so, it'd be the end of an era. Gmane has been a tremendous asset to the community for well over a decade; indeed, it feels as though it's always been there.

by zeveb 10y ago

If so, it'd be the end of an era. Gmane has been a tremendous asset to the community for well over a decade; indeed, it feels as though it's always been there. I suppose that it's one more nail in the coffin of NNTP. I really miss net news, but it probably wasn't possible for it to scale to support the entire world. It's sad, though: for a short time, all the interesting people in the world were able to communicate with one another.

jandrese 10y ago
A NNTP service could definitely still work, but it would have to be a lot more locked down. I really hate that the alternative is web forums which are always stuck with a small fraction of the functionality of any good news reader and get bogged down easily if they get popular and never have a good search feature.
- snaky 10y ago
  NNTP is just the right abstraction to wrap any discussion-based thing. It would be nice to have just nntp://news.ycombinator.com, nntp://reddit.com and so on instead of bunch of incompatible APIs actually. It's like beautiful Perl's TIE [1] where you wrap an object in it and it exposed as regular scalar, array, hash or filehandle instead of 'an object' with it's own methods users need to learn to use it. I think Gmane 2.0, if it ever will be born, would have a mechanism of plugins, that allow easy wrapping any web-forum in it, by writing a little template describing the layout of pages like 'this is topic, this is message body' and so on. And the crawler to use the plugins, of course. [1] http://perldoc.perl.org/perltie.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perltie.html
  - jandrese 10y ago
    A version of NNTP where groups were automatically moderated and strong controls were in place to weed out spammers and trolls could work. The moderation would have to be baked into the core of the protocol and not some weird half measure bolted onto the side however. Once a community is large enough you either moderate it or you get another /b/.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Spam filtering works reasonably well now, for any of the free services. Trolls? Ignore 'em.
    - snaky 10y ago
      NNTP is transport protocol, orthogonal to moderation - like HN or Reddit or any other site moderation to HTTP.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    NNTP is a very nice, simple protocol to implement, both server and client-side. Well, except for the mess that is RFC 822. At least NNTP decided to go 8-bit safe eons ago, so you just have to shove everything in UTF-8 and you can screw RFC 2047 in the face.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      What specific issues with 822?
      - jcranmer 10y ago
        Major issues: * RFC 2047 is a pain in the butt * Handling attachments can be difficult (particularly the inability to safely add binary data) * The display name/address is both painful in terms of syntax. * CFWS in general (you can tell who's written an email client by their reaction to the letters CFWS) * Header fields in general have way too lenient handling, so there's no way to, e.g., guarantee non-ASCII handling (RFC 2047 needs to be handled differently in the Subject: header than from the From: header, and the Content-Type: header does something else entirely). * Mandatory line-length limits, which means you need to be able to insert line breaks in however you encode custom header values * No way to get attachments without the body or vice versa * All metadata needs to be shoved into a header (see above about i18n, line length, and CFWS)
        dredmorbius 10y ago
        What would you change given a greenfield opportunity? What would you add? Remove? Why? For myself: the basic RF282 concept of sender, subject, recipient (or newsgroup), date, and references, plus body, seem reasonable. How best to take these to present capabilities (and needs) is another question.
Kadin 10y ago
Actually I think NNTP solved a bunch of problems that we didn't even know we had at the time, including scaling and funding. NNTP servers were generally provided by your ISP, so ISPs built the capacity out as they added subscribers, and added groups based on the perceived interest. It wasn't especially difficult (and it's pretty trivial today) to offer all the "official" text-based newsgroups with a few days or weeks worth of retention; it only becomes a significant undertaking when you want to offer months of retention for binaries newsgroups. Similarly, because the NNTP servers were basically a value-added ISP service, they were funded by subscriber fees. You never had a problem with a newsgroup suddenly getting popular and being unable to pay their own hosting fees, or suddenly tossing ads in order to pay the hosting bill, which is unfortunately common with webforums. And you don't have problems with a single server crashing and wiping out the history of a whole group. It's all pretty robust. Architecturally, netnews was superior to web forums. Where it failed was in not having a good response to the spam problem. I think that had it not been for spam, people wouldn't have left NNTP for HTTP-hosted webforums nearly as quickly. But the decentralized nature of netnews meant there wasn't anyone who could quickly implement any of the myriad solutions that were proposed (cryptographic proof-of-work plus reputation systems probably would have cut down on the worst offenders). My guess is that eventually, we'll reinvent something that's similar to NNTP but by another name (with the decentralization, server-server replication, gateways to other protocols, etc.), but it's been a long and unfortunate diversion in the meantime.
- derefr 10y ago
  I don't know about that: the core conceit—of ISPs doing any sort of edge server hosting—is nearly dead itself. Email is nearly-entirely owned by megacorps, unencrypted (and therefore edge-cacheable) HTTP is dying, DNS is basically just Google and OpenDNS at this point... soon ISPs won't run any OSI-level-7 services at all. They won't need data-centers, just switches. I don't see that trend reversing. And given that, you can't really have a store-and-forward edge-caching system that truly resembles NNTP. At most, you can get a hierarchical network like IRC.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Pretty much. Around where i live, power companies have started offering fiber services. But they just pull the actual fiber along their existing power lines. Just about all of them has teamed up with a third party that handle not just ISP, but also TV and VOIP.

by zeveb 10y ago

jandrese 10y ago

A NNTP service could definitely still work, but it would have to be a lot more locked down. I really hate that the alternative is web forums which are always stuck with a small fraction of the functionality of any good news reader and get bogged down easily if they get popular and never have a good search feature.

snaky 10y ago
NNTP is just the right abstraction to wrap any discussion-based thing. It would be nice to have just nntp://news.ycombinator.com, nntp://reddit.com and so on instead of bunch of incompatible APIs actually. It's like beautiful Perl's TIE [1] where you wrap an object in it and it exposed as regular scalar, array, hash or filehandle instead of 'an object' with it's own methods users need to learn to use it. I think Gmane 2.0, if it ever will be born, would have a mechanism of plugins, that allow easy wrapping any web-forum in it, by writing a little template describing the layout of pages like 'this is topic, this is message body' and so on. And the crawler to use the plugins, of course. [1] http://perldoc.perl.org/perltie.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perltie.html
- jandrese 10y ago
  A version of NNTP where groups were automatically moderated and strong controls were in place to weed out spammers and trolls could work. The moderation would have to be baked into the core of the protocol and not some weird half measure bolted onto the side however. Once a community is large enough you either moderate it or you get another /b/.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Spam filtering works reasonably well now, for any of the free services. Trolls? Ignore 'em.
  - snaky 10y ago
    NNTP is transport protocol, orthogonal to moderation - like HN or Reddit or any other site moderation to HTTP.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  NNTP is a very nice, simple protocol to implement, both server and client-side. Well, except for the mess that is RFC 822. At least NNTP decided to go 8-bit safe eons ago, so you just have to shove everything in UTF-8 and you can screw RFC 2047 in the face.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    What specific issues with 822?
    - jcranmer 10y ago
      Major issues: * RFC 2047 is a pain in the butt * Handling attachments can be difficult (particularly the inability to safely add binary data) * The display name/address is both painful in terms of syntax. * CFWS in general (you can tell who's written an email client by their reaction to the letters CFWS) * Header fields in general have way too lenient handling, so there's no way to, e.g., guarantee non-ASCII handling (RFC 2047 needs to be handled differently in the Subject: header than from the From: header, and the Content-Type: header does something else entirely). * Mandatory line-length limits, which means you need to be able to insert line breaks in however you encode custom header values * No way to get attachments without the body or vice versa * All metadata needs to be shoved into a header (see above about i18n, line length, and CFWS)
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        What would you change given a greenfield opportunity? What would you add? Remove? Why? For myself: the basic RF282 concept of sender, subject, recipient (or newsgroup), date, and references, plus body, seem reasonable. How best to take these to present capabilities (and needs) is another question.

Kadin 10y ago

Actually I think NNTP solved a bunch of problems that we didn't even know we had at the time, including scaling and funding. NNTP servers were generally provided by your ISP, so ISPs built the capacity out as they added subscribers, and added groups based on the perceived interest. It wasn't especially difficult (and it's pretty trivial today) to offer all the "official" text-based newsgroups with a few days or weeks worth of retention; it only becomes a significant undertaking when you want to offer months of retention for binaries newsgroups. Similarly, because the NNTP servers were basically a value-added ISP service, they were funded by subscriber fees. You never had a problem with a newsgroup suddenly getting popular and being unable to pay their own hosting fees, or suddenly tossing ads in order to pay the hosting bill, which is unfortunately common with webforums. And you don't have problems with a single server crashing and wiping out the history of a whole group. It's all pretty robust. Architecturally, netnews was superior to web forums. Where it failed was in not having a good response to the spam problem. I think that had it not been for spam, people wouldn't have left NNTP for HTTP-hosted webforums nearly as quickly. But the decentralized nature of netnews meant there wasn't anyone who could quickly implement any of the myriad solutions that were proposed (cryptographic proof-of-work plus reputation systems probably would have cut down on the worst offenders). My guess is that eventually, we'll reinvent something that's similar to NNTP but by another name (with the decentralization, server-server replication, gateways to other protocols, etc.), but it's been a long and unfortunate diversion in the meantime.

derefr 10y ago
I don't know about that: the core conceit—of ISPs doing any sort of edge server hosting—is nearly dead itself. Email is nearly-entirely owned by megacorps, unencrypted (and therefore edge-cacheable) HTTP is dying, DNS is basically just Google and OpenDNS at this point... soon ISPs won't run any OSI-level-7 services at all. They won't need data-centers, just switches. I don't see that trend reversing. And given that, you can't really have a store-and-forward edge-caching system that truly resembles NNTP. At most, you can get a hierarchical network like IRC.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Pretty much. Around where i live, power companies have started offering fiber services. But they just pull the actual fiber along their existing power lines. Just about all of them has teamed up with a third party that handle not just ISP, but also TV and VOIP.