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Superhighway84 – a Usenet-inspired decentralized internet discussion system
- Jotra7 5y ago[dead]
- grenoire 5y agoThis feels very... style over substance? As if it was designed with a 'usenet was so hacker-cool' idea behind it.
- wmf 5y agoMarketing works. And anything that doesn't follow the popular aesthetic is probably made with real love.
- layer8 5y agoTraditional usenet clients were the most efficient discussion software in terms of usability. Everything since then (web forums, Slack-like clients, Discord, HN, etc.) has been a step backwards. That’s very much substance in my book.
- treesknees 5y agoI’d argue in terms of usability, todays platforms are an improvement. You can just look at pure user counts and see they are more usable/accessible overall than usernet (or irc for that matter) ever was. Discord, for example, is easy enough to learn that millions of non-technical users have been able to hop on and start using it. Perhaps you’re thinking of efficiency in terms of screen/white space or CLI workflows over GUI workflows.
- jrandm 5y ago> You can just look at pure user counts and see they are more usable/accessible overall User counts are a poor comparison when you consider how much the pool of potential users has grown. As points to reference, Microsoft Windows 95 sold 7 million copies in its first 5 weeks so call it ~73 million copies sold the first year.[0] 20 years later in 2015, Samsung, Apple, and Huawei combined sold ~73 million phones across 5 models.[1] Windows 10, released that same year, had Microsoft shooting for it installed on 1 billion devices within 3 years.[2] 2005 estimates 1 billion (or 16% of the global population) online. 2020 estimates 4.9 billion (or 63% of the global population) online.[3] A million users used to be a big deal not that long ago.[4] Not that I disagree we've gotten better at some things but Outlook Express (newsgroups) and mIRC (irc) seemed plenty accessible to millions of non-technical users. [0]: https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/launch-of-windows-95/ https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/launch-of-windows-95... - when searching for a number I saw first-year estimates at ~40 million [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones#2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... [2]: They made it in 5, https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21116762/microsoft-windows-10-active-devices-billion-7-support https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21116762/microsoft-window... [3]: https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2021/11/15/internet-use/ https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2021/11/15/inte... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e0n7vTLz1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e0n7vTLz1U
- mmcgaha 5y agoForte Agent was the only reason that I had a windows PC in the mid/late 90s. Yep an IXer posting with Agent may have made me the butt of the joke, but that was some of the most intuitive software ever written.
- u801e 5y ago> Not that I disagree we've gotten better at some things but Outlook Express (newsgroups) and mIRC (irc) seemed plenty accessible to millions of non-technical users. This was my experience as well decades ago. Unfortunately, people claim that Usenet and/or irc are to technical for the average user to figure out. I guess the skill level of the average user has gone down in the interim.
- rhizome 5y agoClients like Free Agent had a three-pane design that preceded iTunes' by years and I wouldn't doubt was the inspiration for its layout. New users today would feel right at home with it.
- lstodd 5y agoImprovement in user counts? I'll give you that. Improvement in the quality of discussion? Not so much. It isn't a coincindence that we're discussing this here and not somewhere on discord. Remember the eternal september.
- layer8 5y agoOne important Usenet feature that enables efficient tracking of and participation in discussion is that read/unread status is tracked per posting. (See my related comment in the sibling subthread.) That kind-of requires keyboard navigation to make it practical (e.g. press Tab to jump to the next unread posting, which then automatically becomes read). But keyboard navigation by itself also tends to maximize usability for frequent/regular users, which I'd argue are the important demographics for discussion forums. One issue is with mobile UI, where there's really no good way to make per-posting read/unread status practical with just touch (and/or voice) input. But I'd also argue that asynchronous discussions (as opposed to chats/IM) are best performed on desktop. On mobile they will always remain a compromise in usability and content quality.
- georgeoliver 5y agoWhen a community I'm part of moved from Usenet to a forum around 2007, I remember a few technical points that persuaded members, mainly easier moderation and post editing. One troll in a community of 200 has an outsized impact.
- layer8 5y agoOne Usenet killer feature that was lost in web forums is the per-post read/unread status, which made long-running subthreads manageable, decoupling them from each other. In web forums you only have "up to page xy" read/unread status, which forces participants to follow threads linearly and thus decreases asynchronicity and makes parallel subthreads hard to follow.
- yeetaccount4 5y agoThe branding comes off as pretty self conscious, but it sounds pretty neat. I’ll give it a shot when I’ve got some time.
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoWhile Usenet traditionally had the minimalist interface that software people enjoy/cargo cult, FidoNet echos and other people sending and receiving from Usenet would often have similarly stylized custom BBS style interfaces to send and receive Usenet articles. If it's just OrbitDB, you could probably put together your own UX to view it.
- peterth3 5y agoI’m confused by the term “decentralized internet.” The internet has always been decentralized. When the internet was created it’s primary use case was for decentralized communication. A better term might be “blockchain internet”?
- nope96 5y agoI think the author is saying: "decentralized internet discussion system", not "decentralized internet". Reddit and Hacker News are centralized. Usenet was decentralized, the usenet servers were run by various companies (many different ISPs across the globe) and they synced up with each other via a p2p protocol.
- root_axis 5y agoReddit and HN aren't "centralized", they're just individual nodes on a decentralized network. By that definition the usenet groups of yore were also "centralized".
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoYour newsserver could go down or block you and yet you could go to some other newsserver and have access to the network. If Reddit or HN block you, you aren't chatting on those platforms again with those names.
- root_axis 5y agoReddit or HN could block you and yet you still have access to the network, just not the part of it hosted on reddit or HN.
- welshwelsh 5y agoBut with Usenet, you don't lose access to any content at all. It would be like if one reddit server bans you, but you can still use reddit and other people can still see your comments because other servers, owned by other people, also host reddit.
- RF_Savage 5y agoI wanted to ask why use this instead of the still existing Usenet. But the IPFS based hosting is a neat idea. This solves the problem that Usenet has with ISP's dropping the alt hierarchy for example. Using IPFS also deals with the hurdle of actually hosting the News servers. I wonder how it will deal with the inevitable spam and csam. Still, I'm following this with interest. Aether was interesting, but it's many tcp connections chocked my consumer grade modem to death, which made it impossible to keep my node online. It was a legit cool project. I wonder if the #radio group I started still exists on it...
- nope96 5y ago> I wonder how it will deal with the inevitable spam and csam. I'm thinking a modern Usenet would need something like ad blocker lists - volunteer run filter(s) that you choose to subscribe to.
- Natsu 5y agoMaybe people could just make and sign posts in an appropriate group that you can subscribe to/diff/edit as you please.
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoThat is exactly how Usenet works right now sans the restriction to sign posts. But several folks do indeed sign their posts.
- zrm 5y ago> I'm thinking a modern Usenet would need something like ad blocker lists - volunteer run filter(s) that you choose to subscribe to. This would be most useful if they're maintained per-category, by the people who frequent those categories. So then each filter list has "moderators" who can add stuff to it, the people who frequent a category usually subscribe to its most popular filter list, but nobody is required to. Then because it's community-moderated and non-centralized you don't get the same problems with you do with email spam filtering where people will try to get their competitors' non-spam senders added to the global spam filter list.
- Aeolun 5y agoThat domain! I’m surprised it didn’t trigger any security filters. That said, this looks really cool. I like it integrates with your own editor.
- saurik 5y agoJapanese people should be allowed to own domain names (in this case, the domain is literally just their name: Marius).
- remexre 5y agoHN shows it before de-punycoding (punydecoding?), which if you're not familiar with Punycode, does indeed look a bit "spooky."
- Aeolun 5y agoEven after accessing the link from HN the domain looks exactly the same in my browser. Even if it is punycoding, I’m not sure how one would distinguish the actual domain from the coded one (unless you know the specific format convention that punycode follows).
- DarylZero 5y agoBecause HN sucks as a web site.
- tjpnz 5y agoHad to look up punydecoding (おもしろいですね!). Any reason why it's applied to kana when HN displays it just fine in comments?
- csnover 5y agoThe punycode representation of the domain name is the “true” representation, HN just doesn’t detect that and convert it from punycode to Unicode. This may be unintentional, or it may be to avoid homoglyph attacks.
- 5y ago
- ddingus 5y agoCool! I'm off to read about it. ...the basic idea on the main page is super attractive.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoIt's a shame that Usenet did not persist. There's nothing stopping anyone from using NNTP to create a new separate "forum" that is not connected to "Usenet". But since Usenet lost its popularity there's very little NNTP client software available now. A shame.
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoIt is a bit moribund but there are some newsgroups that are alive. It's full of spam, trolls, and obnoxious contrarians, but you can post about whatever you'd like, receive replies for whomever, and never have to deal with upvote politics or comment pile-ons. One newsgroup I recommend is `comp.sys.raspberry-pi`. It has a pretty high SNR and is quite active, especially in comparison to some other groups on Usenet.
- musicale 5y ago> upvote politics I hadn't heard this term before for upvote/downvote wars (and associated groupthink/monoculture), but I think it's a good one.
- jonathankoren 5y agoYup. I’m particularly fond of the results of my comment when called vote counters “sentiment thermometers”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21539167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21539167
- jjav 5y agoBTW Usenet is still around, I still read it every week. Most groups are dead or pure bot spam, but there are pockets of actual activity. Usenet is quite awesome conceptually. It's a much better solution than mailing lists for large group discussions, and obviously better than all proprietary walled garden forums.
- vzaliva 5y agoThe idea of building new Usenet-inspired discussion system is great. We can update it with new distributed tech, privacy, etc. However authors chose to limit it to "retro text-only inteface." In my opinion this is a handicap. At least basic hypertext a-la Slack markdown is expected. Otherwise it will appeal only to old users reminsicing about good old times.
- caslon 5y agoMarkdown was designed to be human-readable; there's no need to support it at the protocol level or the implementation level. That said, I don't see this appealing to old users, either. IPFS kind of ruins the appeal.
- encryptluks2 5y agoMarkdown isn't Slack-esq. By you saying that it makes it seem like you want this to be like some millennial service for kids who grew up on Discord and Twitter.
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoThis is such a silly thing to bikeshed over. The oldest millennials are 40. Tastes change with time.
- u801e 5y agoA number of NNTP clients supported rendering bold, italic, or underlined text by just adding enclosing asterisks, slashes, or underscores.
- apatters 5y agoA lot of the comments here seem to be missing the point and presumably come from people that didn't actually install the program and try it out, or hell even read the README. This thing is extremely minimalist. A little bit silly to be talking about adding Markdown, antispam or privacy support when it uses $EDITOR for viewing/authoring posts, and the DB is world writeable... Personally I think this is a lot of fun, it's the first project that has actually motivated me to install IPFS (which I thought would be much harder). It is in the vein of something like SDF where the retro interface might attract the right kind of people. I hope the author keeps working on it and if I knew Go I might contribute :)
- syngrog66 5y agoIPFS is one of those things that shows up on my radar every year or so recently, I drool over it from afar, then I download it and install it and try to use it for a real use case and... it doesnt work. I've went thru what I thought were the default tutorials and... nothing. Made me feel like the docs were leaving something out. On paper it would be a useful tool to add to my toolbox. Someday...
- genewitch 5y agoLet's say I have ten hard drives where no more than two are the same size, so at least 5 pairs or maybe 10 different sizes. For this, zfs cannot be used to expose a single mountpoint. Perhaps with something like ipfs a single mountpoint could be exposed and allow replicated data to be retained? The key word here is "replicated" - as in a certainty that the data exists on more than one physical storage device. I'm spitballing and this isn't necessarily directed at the parent of this comment.
- rhizome 5y agoDiscoverability has always been the #1 issue for me, so if someone can figure out how to establish any kind of namespace for IPFS I'm willing to apply a few more braincells to it.
- squarefoot 5y agoJust an idea: What if instead of writing a client that uses a new protocol we did that on the server? That is, implementing something like this project, but into a local news server, so that users can connect with whatever client they wish to localhost:119, while the server maintains the groups and messages pool in sync through IPFS or any similar mean.
- dcposch 5y agoAh the aesthetics are absolutely perfect. software minimalism x vaporwave And it's not just empty nostalgia. A text interface should be lightning fast. Hit a button, next screen repaint reacts. The ultimate retort to all the 5mb websites full of dropped frames, drop shadows and jank. Solidity developers are already out here counting every instruction. Maybe what's old is new.
- ntauthority 5y agoIt's a little ironic that this application actually does not run on Windows[1] apparently due a bug in a library[2] unfixed since 2018, which is owned and maintained by a $83B publicly-listed company[3], last updated 14 days ago, but unwilling to fix that little cross-platform bug. [1]: https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84/issues/13 https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84/issues/13 [2]: https://github.com/uber-go/zap/issues/621 https://github.com/uber-go/zap/issues/621 [3]: https://github.com/uber-go https://github.com/uber-go
- altilunium 5y agoWindows Port : https://github.com/altilunium/superhighway84 https://github.com/altilunium/superhighway84 Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello world Newsgroup: misc.linux = = = = = = Yes. Altilunium was me. After i saw the HN thread about superhighway84, i can't wait to try it by myself. Clone the repo, install the IPFS, "go build .", then i found that issue. I solved that issue by changing zap.NewProductionConfig() to zap.NewProduction(), then i "disabled" the whole config module, switching it temporarily by using hardcode configuration. Now, it's finally working. New notepad.exe window will be spawned whenever i opened a new article. But i found a new problem. The TUI is broken whenever a new notepad.exe window is spawned. To solve it, i make a new thread by using goroutine to "fork" the current process, so it could spawn the notepad.exe safely. Reading a thread : Ok Replying a thread : Ok Creating a new thread : ((I'm currently testing it right now) On Tue Dec 28 22:41:47 2021 mrus@cbrspc7 wrote: > Oh hey, that's awesome! :-D There's an open issue on that rn. Will happily accept PRs if you'd like to. Don't have a Windows computer around to test, though. On Tue Dec 28 22:36:16 2021 nya wrote: > Finally.. After tweaking the source code, now i can run it from Windows.. ^^