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somebody was asking in a thread the other day about some open protocol for forums/subreddits/whatever that different people could host, that could be fronted by

somebody was asking in a thread the other day about some open protocol for forums/subreddits/whatever that different people could host, that could be fronted by independent clients. well, there you go, NNTP still exists. write some ios/android NNTP clients that can handle multiple servers w/credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to distribute the posts to other servers.

chongli 3y ago
How do you deal with spam and moderation? What about the sidebar and pinned posts? Upvoting/downvoting? There’s a lot of quality-of-life features in modern forums like Reddit and HN that you don’t have with these old technologies.
- sigstoat 3y ago
  "extensions to the protocol" do you need the whole thing designed in a comment? the original context was to decompose subreddits into their own decentralized and separately hosted things. so: dump spam into some hidden pseudo-group that only mods can see. let them post replies to the posts which are interpreted by the server to release/delete the spam add additional headers on posts to mark that they're pinned or sidebarred. clients will have to know how to interpret that, but you'll remain backwards compatible with everything that already exists again if you really want upvoting/downvoting, have specially formatted reply posts which the server uses to increment/decrement the vote counter, which is presented as a special header on the posts. special clients can display it like reddit, and even old clients can probably make use of it for filtering purposes. now, i did the design work, so you go implement it.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I don't see the advantage of doing this vs. doing a new federated protocol from scratch, with all of the modern features built-in, and accessible from a web browser rather than a separate news reader.
- AdamH12113 3y ago
  > How do you deal with spam and moderation? Moderated newsgroups existed (and presumably still do). I was never a moderator myself, but to my understanding they use an SMTP-based system. I'm sure that could be improved. > What about the sidebar and pinned posts? The equivalent of pinned posts would be a FAQ. Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups. > Upvoting/downvoting? The biggest difference between web-based discussion boards and Usenet is that in Usenet almost everything is done on the client side. Threading, searching, filtering, subscribing, blocking of users and threads, and other such administrative tasks were all done on your computer by software that you chose. Filtering in particular could be much more advanced than what we have today. Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z". The downside of all this was that it was entirely local, individual, and ephemeral. Usenet is a distribution protocol, not a storage or display protocol. News servers typically didn't keep old posts for more than a few months. If you wanted to save a post you either archived it yourself (possibly in your newsreader) or posted it to the web somewhere. Responses to posts provided context by quoting the post inline. Another downside is that Usenet is text-only -- you could embed binaries (and there were whole groups dedicated to that), but it wasn't normally done in discussion groups. If you needed images, you made ASCII art. :-) Some of the downsides can be mitigated -- shared blocklists, for instance, already exist and are used by ad blockers and (IIRC) Twitter clients. But part of the charm of Usenet is that it's not a modern web forum with eternal storage and constant redesigns and monetization attempts and Official Policies from Corporate Management. It's just a place where you can talk about things. It doesn't really scale to having three million people on the same forum, but not every forum needs or wants three million participants. (And back in the day there weren't three million people on Usenet in the first place.)
  - chongli 3y ago
    Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups. Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that! They're yet another form of noise to deal with, along with spam. Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z". Local scoring/filtering seems like a non-starter to me. The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds". This can be pretty awful in very large forums such as the most popular subreddits, but can be pretty great in smaller communities (such as small subreddits) or those with strongly-defined community norms such as HN. With an entirely local system you're going to end up creating a very elaborate bespoke protocol to manage and distribute this information or you're going to force individual users to handle everything themselves (with no wisdom of the crowds). Either way is less than ideal and seems to lose much of the advantage of NNTP: simplicity. Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.

chongli 3y ago

How do you deal with spam and moderation? What about the sidebar and pinned posts? Upvoting/downvoting? There’s a lot of quality-of-life features in modern forums like Reddit and HN that you don’t have with these old technologies.

sigstoat 3y ago
"extensions to the protocol" do you need the whole thing designed in a comment? the original context was to decompose subreddits into their own decentralized and separately hosted things. so: dump spam into some hidden pseudo-group that only mods can see. let them post replies to the posts which are interpreted by the server to release/delete the spam add additional headers on posts to mark that they're pinned or sidebarred. clients will have to know how to interpret that, but you'll remain backwards compatible with everything that already exists again if you really want upvoting/downvoting, have specially formatted reply posts which the server uses to increment/decrement the vote counter, which is presented as a special header on the posts. special clients can display it like reddit, and even old clients can probably make use of it for filtering purposes. now, i did the design work, so you go implement it.
- chongli 3y ago
  I don't see the advantage of doing this vs. doing a new federated protocol from scratch, with all of the modern features built-in, and accessible from a web browser rather than a separate news reader.
AdamH12113 3y ago
> How do you deal with spam and moderation? Moderated newsgroups existed (and presumably still do). I was never a moderator myself, but to my understanding they use an SMTP-based system. I'm sure that could be improved. > What about the sidebar and pinned posts? The equivalent of pinned posts would be a FAQ. Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups. > Upvoting/downvoting? The biggest difference between web-based discussion boards and Usenet is that in Usenet almost everything is done on the client side. Threading, searching, filtering, subscribing, blocking of users and threads, and other such administrative tasks were all done on your computer by software that you chose. Filtering in particular could be much more advanced than what we have today. Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z". The downside of all this was that it was entirely local, individual, and ephemeral. Usenet is a distribution protocol, not a storage or display protocol. News servers typically didn't keep old posts for more than a few months. If you wanted to save a post you either archived it yourself (possibly in your newsreader) or posted it to the web somewhere. Responses to posts provided context by quoting the post inline. Another downside is that Usenet is text-only -- you could embed binaries (and there were whole groups dedicated to that), but it wasn't normally done in discussion groups. If you needed images, you made ASCII art. :-) Some of the downsides can be mitigated -- shared blocklists, for instance, already exist and are used by ad blockers and (IIRC) Twitter clients. But part of the charm of Usenet is that it's not a modern web forum with eternal storage and constant redesigns and monetization attempts and Official Policies from Corporate Management. It's just a place where you can talk about things. It doesn't really scale to having three million people on the same forum, but not every forum needs or wants three million participants. (And back in the day there weren't three million people on Usenet in the first place.)
- chongli 3y ago
  Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups. Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that! They're yet another form of noise to deal with, along with spam. Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z". Local scoring/filtering seems like a non-starter to me. The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds". This can be pretty awful in very large forums such as the most popular subreddits, but can be pretty great in smaller communities (such as small subreddits) or those with strongly-defined community norms such as HN. With an entirely local system you're going to end up creating a very elaborate bespoke protocol to manage and distribute this information or you're going to force individual users to handle everything themselves (with no wisdom of the crowds). Either way is less than ideal and seems to lose much of the advantage of NNTP: simplicity. Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.