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Making the internet feel like home again would involve burning down Facebook and reanimating the corpse of NNTP. Why yes, I do feel old and cranky today.

by _jal 9y ago

eeZah7Ux 9y ago
NNTP was federated, decentralized, asynchronous, with hierarchical groups and threaded conversations. Decades ahead, in terms of protocol design, of mailing lists, twitter and stuff like Slack. Please tell me there's hope for a new protocol with the same feature set.
icedchai 9y ago
I was just about to write almost exactly this! I miss Usenet, I really do... I know it's still around, but it's basically dead.
- squarefoot 9y ago
  Google aimed at killing it when they embraced and extinguished Dejanews, then they removed the discussion filter option from their search page, which to me speaks for itself about their nefarious intentions. Then Facebook and Twitter success and ISPS shutting down their servers were the last nails in the coffin. I still use it and am very active on mewsgroups, but traffic today is a fraction of a fraction of what it was in the late 90s. NNTP is a wonderful way to communicate, but it's decentralized and ad free, corporations cannot make a profit out of it, so it must be killed.
pmlnr 9y ago
NNTP is not dead at all. However, finding data on how to run my own NNTP instance is close to nonexistent. I'd be very glad if someone could point me to some docs.
- kruhft 9y ago
  Here's a quickstart: https://serverfault.com/questions/218747/how-to-setup-a-nntp-server-for-usenet https://serverfault.com/questions/218747/how-to-setup-a-nntp... http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html Edit: removed list of dead links. Added article.
msla 9y ago
A good way to revive NNTP would be to gateway a web forum to NNTP, such that posts on the Usenet server become posts on the web forum and vice-versa. The web forum would have its own killfile, like any normal user, which would ban Usenet posters from the web forum, and, of course, individual users would have killfiles as well. Spam might be the insurmountable problem here, but I think it's at least worth an experiment.
- int_19h 9y ago
  Isn't that basically what Google Groups is?
  - msla 9y ago
    In theory, sure. In practice, we can do better on the Web interface side than Google Groups does.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      We probably can, but I think it's good enough as a proof of concept. And it didn't attract enough interest to save Usenet.
phyzome 9y ago
You might like it on Mastodon, then. I could point you to some folks who are hard at work on reanimating gopher on from-scratch computers. :-)
floren 9y ago
There's a little chatter about NNTP in kruhft's thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15980683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15980683 in which I get cranky about NNTP despite not being particularly old, you may appreciate some of that.
nborwankar 9y ago
Finally, someone who remembers NNTP!

Making the internet feel like home again would involve burning down Facebook and reanimating the corpse of NNTP. Why yes, I do feel old and cranky today.

by _jal 9y ago

Making the internet feel like home again would involve burning down Facebook and reanimating the corpse of NNTP. Why yes, I do feel old and cranky today.

eeZah7Ux 9y ago

NNTP was federated, decentralized, asynchronous, with hierarchical groups and threaded conversations. Decades ahead, in terms of protocol design, of mailing lists, twitter and stuff like Slack. Please tell me there's hope for a new protocol with the same feature set.

icedchai 9y ago

I was just about to write almost exactly this! I miss Usenet, I really do... I know it's still around, but it's basically dead.

squarefoot 9y ago
Google aimed at killing it when they embraced and extinguished Dejanews, then they removed the discussion filter option from their search page, which to me speaks for itself about their nefarious intentions. Then Facebook and Twitter success and ISPS shutting down their servers were the last nails in the coffin. I still use it and am very active on mewsgroups, but traffic today is a fraction of a fraction of what it was in the late 90s. NNTP is a wonderful way to communicate, but it's decentralized and ad free, corporations cannot make a profit out of it, so it must be killed.

pmlnr 9y ago

NNTP is not dead at all. However, finding data on how to run my own NNTP instance is close to nonexistent. I'd be very glad if someone could point me to some docs.

kruhft 9y ago
Here's a quickstart: https://serverfault.com/questions/218747/how-to-setup-a-nntp-server-for-usenet https://serverfault.com/questions/218747/how-to-setup-a-nntp... http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html Edit: removed list of dead links. Added article.

msla 9y ago

A good way to revive NNTP would be to gateway a web forum to NNTP, such that posts on the Usenet server become posts on the web forum and vice-versa. The web forum would have its own killfile, like any normal user, which would ban Usenet posters from the web forum, and, of course, individual users would have killfiles as well. Spam might be the insurmountable problem here, but I think it's at least worth an experiment.

int_19h 9y ago
Isn't that basically what Google Groups is?
- msla 9y ago
  In theory, sure. In practice, we can do better on the Web interface side than Google Groups does.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    We probably can, but I think it's good enough as a proof of concept. And it didn't attract enough interest to save Usenet.

phyzome 9y ago

You might like it on Mastodon, then. I could point you to some folks who are hard at work on reanimating gopher on from-scratch computers. :-)

floren 9y ago

There's a little chatter about NNTP in kruhft's thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15980683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15980683 in which I get cranky about NNTP despite not being particularly old, you may appreciate some of that.

nborwankar 9y ago

Finally, someone who remembers NNTP!