4 ms·

1) usenet was a kind of opt-in syndication that ran through uucp jobs that often went through whitelists at the local level, often over low bandwidth modems. pi

by scrame 3y ago

1) usenet was a kind of opt-in syndication that ran through uucp jobs that often went through whitelists at the local level, often over low bandwidth modems. pirate and other binary channels were frequently not rebroadcast. 2) A decentralized usenet like you're describing is an email list with an archive. 3) Absolutely not. you're describing realID and Facebook. 4) Absolutely not you're describing the powermod problem that ruins all of these larger forums. and since you seem a little unfamiliar with it's history, you should look up ARMM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARMM_(Usenet) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARMM_(Usenet) http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/ARMM.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/ARMM.html

shadowgovt 3y ago
In the post-truth era, (3) will become increasingly vital because reputation is the only tool we have to distinguish signal from noise.
- scrame 3y ago
  and reputation is what, reddit karma? fb likes? prom king? blue checks on Twitter? FORMER bluechecks? Its the opposite of an open platform to rank people by the same social media stuff that OP is saying doesn't work because it still wants a centralized form of reputation. You can't resurrect the old usenet the way OP is talking about because he doesn't know what usenet was.
  - indus 3y ago
    reputation is a lazy filter.
- indus 3y ago
  Choosing to be anonymous is one thing but not verifying the identity is another. Why do we favor content from anonymous identities that disrupt the flow—-is a big question running as mods for communities.
bckr 3y ago
And why don’t we just build stuff on top of email?
- scrame 3y ago
  how many accounts do you have require an email address for contact / verification? would authy or okta be better? they for sure require an email address. would a decentralized usenet that requires me to be bob jones/125 nonce st/cleveland be better for me the user or.. whatever the hell this proposal is? Why should I send my passport or birth certificate to some random server on the internet? fighting spam is an issue that I addressed in my first comment.
  - bckr 3y ago
    Hmm, not sure my intention came across properly in my short comment. I meant to say, why don’t we build social media on top of email? It’s a protocol we already use for everything.
- Multicomp 3y ago
  we have delta chat built on email, and it has a few broadcast lists and things, but its tiny
- joveian 3y ago
  There are still a number of discussion email lists around. Riseup hosts a bunch of them for example: https://lists.riseup.net/www/ https://lists.riseup.net/www/ One issue is that many email providers aren't really maintaining their system and can't always reliably send mail in the ways needed for spam tracking, even though DMARC is over a decade old at this point. The large providers seem to randomly classify mail as spam at times, which also doesn't help. I've been thinking that an email client focused forum might work well, where you effectively get a new account for a particular site that can only be used to send "email" within the forum, but you can acess the list over IMAP/JMAP or webmail on the site. This also means you don't need to have an existing email account that you don't mind the address being public, although on the negative side it would attract a bunch of spam that would currently be filtered out by most email providers. Additionally, there could often be a small privacy loss contacting a particular server for messages (the server sees the times you check for messages similar to visiting a website but unlike real email), although I think many email providers can pull messages from IMAP on a schedule (but then you get the random spam classification issues again). Moderation and anti-spam tools and notification options are the main issues I can think of with this idea and would need some work. The closest thing currently that I know of is public-inbox, which it sounds like it will expose archives over IMAP among other options, but not in a way that lets you post. https://lwn.net/Articles/748184/ https://lwn.net/Articles/748184/

by scrame 3y ago

shadowgovt 3y ago

In the post-truth era, (3) will become increasingly vital because reputation is the only tool we have to distinguish signal from noise.

scrame 3y ago
and reputation is what, reddit karma? fb likes? prom king? blue checks on Twitter? FORMER bluechecks? Its the opposite of an open platform to rank people by the same social media stuff that OP is saying doesn't work because it still wants a centralized form of reputation. You can't resurrect the old usenet the way OP is talking about because he doesn't know what usenet was.
- indus 3y ago
  reputation is a lazy filter.
indus 3y ago
Choosing to be anonymous is one thing but not verifying the identity is another. Why do we favor content from anonymous identities that disrupt the flow—-is a big question running as mods for communities.

bckr 3y ago

And why don’t we just build stuff on top of email?

scrame 3y ago
how many accounts do you have require an email address for contact / verification? would authy or okta be better? they for sure require an email address. would a decentralized usenet that requires me to be bob jones/125 nonce st/cleveland be better for me the user or.. whatever the hell this proposal is? Why should I send my passport or birth certificate to some random server on the internet? fighting spam is an issue that I addressed in my first comment.
- bckr 3y ago
  Hmm, not sure my intention came across properly in my short comment. I meant to say, why don’t we build social media on top of email? It’s a protocol we already use for everything.
Multicomp 3y ago
we have delta chat built on email, and it has a few broadcast lists and things, but its tiny
joveian 3y ago
There are still a number of discussion email lists around. Riseup hosts a bunch of them for example: https://lists.riseup.net/www/ https://lists.riseup.net/www/ One issue is that many email providers aren't really maintaining their system and can't always reliably send mail in the ways needed for spam tracking, even though DMARC is over a decade old at this point. The large providers seem to randomly classify mail as spam at times, which also doesn't help. I've been thinking that an email client focused forum might work well, where you effectively get a new account for a particular site that can only be used to send "email" within the forum, but you can acess the list over IMAP/JMAP or webmail on the site. This also means you don't need to have an existing email account that you don't mind the address being public, although on the negative side it would attract a bunch of spam that would currently be filtered out by most email providers. Additionally, there could often be a small privacy loss contacting a particular server for messages (the server sees the times you check for messages similar to visiting a website but unlike real email), although I think many email providers can pull messages from IMAP on a schedule (but then you get the random spam classification issues again). Moderation and anti-spam tools and notification options are the main issues I can think of with this idea and would need some work. The closest thing currently that I know of is public-inbox, which it sounds like it will expose archives over IMAP among other options, but not in a way that lets you post. https://lwn.net/Articles/748184/ https://lwn.net/Articles/748184/