There are moderated groups. The NetNews Moderator's Handbook[1] has technical details (and more) but basically:
'Moderated' means that all postings to the newsgroup go to a mail
address (e.g. comp.std.unix@uunet.uu.net) instead of appearing
in the newsgroup directly. The postings are then forwarded via
email to a moderator, or group of moderators, or even an automated
program, who decides whether to actually inject the article into
the newsgroup or to reject it as not meeting guidelines spelled
out in the group's charter.
Notably, though, USENET moderation was managed entirely by the addition of a single, unverified, header to the message ("Approved: cuzisayso"). This allowed for simple distribution, but equally simple circumvention.
Proper moderation for anything important would require cryptographic signatures and a solid federated PKI. Maybe the world is ready, this time. :)
I think the world is ready for someone to make an actual implementation and start using it for some actual conversation!
As long as you have an actual living conversation, then an open model of development can work... which means it doesn't have to be perfect from the start, and you don't need a beautiful landing page, because you want to attract the hackers and crazy people.
You also want to encourage lots of forks and independent implementations, because if it turns into some big mega-repository with some big bloated thing that includes Scala, Erlang, Babel, Bootstrap, and who knows what other ungodly monsters, then it's just going to become a boring monstrosity.
So you'd start with inviting a few people and then encourage them to use their own servers and clients. Make sure everyone understands that the protocols are in flux because you're trying to figure out together what will work.
The conceptual simplicity of Git would be an inspiration. There are different implementations of Git... but we could be even more obviously amenable to that, by using standardized messaging formats for example.
I think plain text messages, as on Usenet and mailing lists, are the best. You don't have to agree on a Markdown/whatever complex thing. Attachments if you want to send other documents. Hacker News developed consensus formatting for links and footnotes, and we seem to get on fine without inline images and tables and all the other fancy nonsense.
I agree. It'd be great fun to build something incorporating everything we knew about distributed and federated systems in the days before their incompatibility with business models became an issue.
There's a lot of good stuff in XMPP, too. As well as some pre-discovered dead ends.
Yeah. From a hacker's perspective, a business model is just some way to keep a thing up and running. If it doesn't create a bunch of jobs at some office somewhere or lead to an IPO, well, that's just worldly affairs, right?
The distributed/federated stuff is still alive, maybe more than ever. Git is a fantastic example. I push and pull repositories between computers all the time. Often over ad-hoc WiFi, even.
Usenet and all that stuff is beautiful to reminisce about, but we should keep in mind also that it was largely sponsored by universities, corporations, militaries, and internet service providers...
IRC is a great inspiration too. Nowadays people look at it and think "ew, no Unicode" or "duh, it's not even JSON," but considering its resilience, its simplicity, its adoption, it's an enormous, staggering success.
These beautiful projects that started as tiny little seeds by clever obscure Scandinavian hackers...
It's just all about starting a little thing, getting your friends in on it, and keepin' it hella real.
True, although keep in mind that while USENET's bandwidth was definitely sponsored, the technology (above the TCP layer) was built by hackers as a side project. At some point Larry Wall (e.g.) got a job just being himself, but for a long time he had unrelated professional responsibilities.
Since the bandwidth funding model has now bubbled down to the consumer marketplace, it seems like the conditions are right for a huge variety of services. Actually that was starting to happen before the web swallowed all other services. Don't get me wrong, the web was/is a great thing, but it severely dumbs down the range of protocol expression. The state of websockets in 2016 is a weak imitation of IRC or MUD capabilities more than 20 years ago (never mind adoption problems).
I guess that's a curse of being "good enough". The better has an uphill battle.
