The existing nntp implementations are long enough in the tooth that someone could put some work into them and make them invented there. I recall the spool files

The existing nntp implementations are long enough in the tooth that someone could put some work into them and make them invented there. I recall the spool files were all individually managed so you used to get hot spots around popular groups and have a lot of copy operations to remove old posts. I think the indexing was all done with libdb/libgdbm per newsgroup. Lots of room for improvement there. I’m betting there is no transport security or its sslv3 if you dig into the code base. Lots of people used to lament the lack of user authentication and I think spam basically started on nntp with all the “green card” stuff but on the other hand the whole point of decentralized is you can say stuff other people disagree with and there is no central authority, right? A personal annoyance of mine was all the people who archived everything and never deleted it - there is a phd thesis for someone, how to expire information from a decentralized system. I managed to get Google to remove most of my early Usenet musings (Google groups started off as an nntp archive and for a while they would delete stuff if you asked nicely) and the rest “aged out” as people lost interest in running archives, or their computers crashed, or they switched jobs and nobody else wanted to maintain them after they left. It took roughly three decades but I can’t find a single post of mine anymore.