10 ms·

Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but tha

by danjoc 9y ago

Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but thanks to the spam fighting tactics employed, we ended up with all the power concentrated in the hands of a few. We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children." http was designed to allow anyone to run a server, but thanks to asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking, it's all hosted on the NSA cloud. It hasn't been a good two decades for free speech. The only fight we won was crypto, and they're coming after that again.

maxerickson 9y ago
NNTP is still alive, with basically the primary purpose of disregarding copyright. The talk groups are all abandoned for web forums with UX that people end up preferring (I understand that NNTP allows choice of client and people are going to explain how much better that is; over here in the reality experiment, the abandonment already happened).
pjc50 9y ago
Some combination of spam and usability was already killing NNTP in the very early 2000s. Really it was replaced by phpbb; easier to deploy a new board without the social bureaucracy of USENET, easier to administer. On NNTP it was hard to establish authenticity of posters, hard to ban people, hard to filter spam, and hard to do community moderation. What I think free speech purists don't acknowledge is the huge amount of volunteer emotional labour that goes into making communities work and defending against toxic posters and harmful content. Almost all audiences prefer curated communities.
howard941 9y ago
A small set of hosts intersecting with those 10 also ditched their netnews newservers because of, as you say, "think of the children." The abandonment was by the ISPs, not so much the users. 95% of a full NNTP server feed was pr0n warez and spam - particularly in alt. - but the remaining 5% in for ex comp.* and sci.* is sorely missed and yes, to my neighbor replies, the nnrp clients _were_ more useable and useful than the broadly dispersed grains of unrelated phpbb servers we have now [this para is admittedly anecdata based on my time as a newsadmin\

by danjoc 9y ago

maxerickson 9y ago

NNTP is still alive, with basically the primary purpose of disregarding copyright. The talk groups are all abandoned for web forums with UX that people end up preferring (I understand that NNTP allows choice of client and people are going to explain how much better that is; over here in the reality experiment, the abandonment already happened).

pjc50 9y ago

Some combination of spam and usability was already killing NNTP in the very early 2000s. Really it was replaced by phpbb; easier to deploy a new board without the social bureaucracy of USENET, easier to administer. On NNTP it was hard to establish authenticity of posters, hard to ban people, hard to filter spam, and hard to do community moderation. What I think free speech purists don't acknowledge is the huge amount of volunteer emotional labour that goes into making communities work and defending against toxic posters and harmful content. Almost all audiences prefer curated communities.

howard941 9y ago

A small set of hosts intersecting with those 10 also ditched their netnews newservers because of, as you say, "think of the children." The abandonment was by the ISPs, not so much the users. 95% of a full NNTP server feed was pr0n warez and spam - particularly in alt. - but the remaining 5% in for ex comp.* and sci.* is sorely missed and yes, to my neighbor replies, the nnrp clients _were_ more useable and useful than the broadly dispersed grains of unrelated phpbb servers we have now [this para is admittedly anecdata based on my time as a newsadmin\