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Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?
352 points by indus on June 9, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 320 comments
The current events of Reddit and Stack Exchange amplifying a thought that communities and users' contributions should be decentralized. The current structure of online communication poses a major risk.

1. There has to be a movement at both protocol and community-level to bring a Usenet like forum for general consumption. Different decetralized subgroups hosting and replicating the communities for others.

2. The model needs to be rethought to ensure that the thoughts and knowledge of communities and users belong to them.

3. These forums should encourage less anonymity and more persistent communication.

4. Trustworthy individuals should run these forums, chosen by the community. Individual groups, academia, organizations running the communities but easily redistributed across to people who want it. This was usenet.

Failure to address these issues allows mega companies to exploit data and control access against users' wishes.

Taking action is crucial to prevent unfavorable outcomes and hold ourselves accountable.




Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless.

I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day.

What you're asking for, for free, isn't possible.


I think a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has.

Artificially constructing a similar level of friction/gatekeeping would have major downsides that might not be worth it, but it could theoretically achieve a community that behaves as that past one did, if that's the goal. Sort of a CAPTCHA to prove you're not just a human, but a leet one. As others have said, HN achieves this in a way. Perhaps non-tech communities can do a similar thing. But educational materials to slowly penetrate the barrier must exist.


I love this idea, but at the same time I think it is not feasible. Back then, there were no economic or even political benefits of being able to join an online community. These days, economic and political reasons are major driving factors of either controlling or infiltrating communities, so there will always be a cat-and-mouse game between insincere actors and moderators. This would be especially true on non-technical communities, although I have seen some pop up over Signal through word of mouth.

On the technical side, it’s probably a lot easier to gatekeep, but even HN has degraded significantly since its early days. Lobster.rs is the only truly technical one that has kept that spirit (to this day I am still not a member, which kind of proves its gatekeeping abilities hah).

p.s. love the username!


Yeah, it's not a technical thing. It's that the unwashed didn't have access/weren't even aware. Sure, you can do the same thing today given explicit gatekeeping and moderation.


> weren't even aware

I guess that aspect can't really be replicated anymore. Back when information moved slowly (in person, telephone, print) and broadcasts only included things with mass appeal (TV/radio ads, etc.) knowledge of a small but high quality community would remain tight for a long time, growing slowly. But the cat's out of the bag now: even the most obscure thing only needs to be posted in some place with tons of eyeballs (which simply could not occur at scale back in the day), if it's good it's upvoted to the top, and immediately it's no longer obscure.


I remember having to resort to submitting a post to alt.tech-support.recovery using a text editor and a raw telnet session due to the "lay-an-egg" requirement for posts to be accepted there and I didn't have software that would let me fiddle with headers in a sane fashion. HN most certainly does not achieve this level of filtration.


I am very curious but my search-fu has failed me. What was the requirement? Is there a link or jargon file or something I could read? I love this kind of stuff.

Thanks!


To post to a moderated group, you would add an "Approved" header to your post before submitting. The content of the header was not important, just the presence.

Equally fun, your "From" address (just another header) was also under your control.

So it was fairly trivial to post articles From: anyone, Approved: yes.

In this way, it was pretty similar to SMTP email in the same era. Before EHLO and reverse lookups and server identification and SPF and DKIM and DMARC and spam filters and universal skepticism, email was simple to spoof.

Now, the readers of USENET at the time were also pretty savvy, and there were other noneditable headers attached to your message that might betray your malfeasance. If you were posting to a newsgroup that didn't permit such activity (there were some that encouraged/required it!), you might earn an angry email sent to your news administrator, who was generally connected to the authority structure (university or employer) and had little patience for your juvenile behaviour.

It worked really well.

...until it didn't! But I don't think this "problem" was a meaningful contributor to the decline of USENET.


Interesting that the content off the Approved header didn't matter. I'm only familiar with Mailman's use of same, where the content has to be the moderator's password: incorrect is equivalent to not providing the header, and correct bypasses the moderation queue. Either way, it gets scrubbed immediately, for secrecy. Essentially, it's just to let listserv moderators send to a list without having to spend time using the queue for their own messages, or automation of any sort such as custom smtp client apps.


Ah, I'd forgotten about the similarity to Mailman's moderation. Right, that works because there's a centralized approval gateway (the mailman code on the mail server) which can also strip out the secret before distributing the message to the list members.

Since NetNews had no central authority, every news server had to judge the validity of posts for themselves. And obviously they couldn't all know the moderator secret without it leaking immediately. Nowadays we'd have a moderator cryptographically sign the message contents. Actually this should have been possible back then too (RSA in 1977 plus a public key published in the newsgroup definition which already held the moderator email address?), but it was not used.

Newsreaders did not show the Approved header. People often stuck fun or funny stuff in there, like easter eggs for those who knew to look.


I know alt.hackers had a similar rule, and even had a testbed group (alt.hackers.test?) you could use to see if you had figured it out without polluting the main feed with test posts.

The FAQ hint was "it's moderated with no moderator". Everything else was up to you.


Man you're asking a lot here. I've had at least three concussions and the tail end of my drug use between when this was a thing and now. I cannot recall the exact specifics but what I do remember was that to get a post accepted to the group you had to include a custom x-header (name escapes me). The contents of that header could be anything, it didn't matter, the presence of the non-standard extra header was what was checked. The best part of it all was nobody, literally no one, would tell aspiring new members how to post to the group. There was the vaguest of hints dropped in the group FAQ and that was it. You could post if you could figure out how to post.


You can always throw a shiny web interface on top of your usenet clone. If it reached critical mass, I'm sure someone would.

SMTP : Gmail :: NNTP : ???

Personally I think the (necessary) lack of binaries is why it would never grow beyond its niche.


SMTP : Gmail :: NNTP : Google Groups

Except whoever made Google Groups (and bought out and shut down DejaNews for it) got their promotion and lost interest and so Usenet For The Unwashed Masses got nixed like so many other Google products.


I think we can do better than that. Google Groups wasn't even up to the standard of contemporary desktop newsreaders.


The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access.

I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.


> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero

Famously so. "This message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars."


Thanks for this... I'd forgotten and now am feeling all nostalgic.


Back when we were going to charge a postage stamp for every email


Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. No thanks.

It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.


> Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs.

ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.

> I don’t need any bill on my internet bill

I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.


> ISPs are a common carrier

Back then yes. Today ISPs and Telcos are the literal definition of the word insidious.

So many examples of them selling user data to third parties without true consent.


> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.

Strictly speaking that’s not entirely true.

1. They could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service.

2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.

3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one.

4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. It would be untenable for all the reasons unmoderated forums are untenable, and also too unappealing to develop a Reddit-sized mass. The mods, for all the issues with Reddit’s mod community, are what make Reddit possible to continue to exist. You would need similar for any Internet social forum of a similar size, scope and user base and if that’s not the goal, plenty of niche forums already exist that you don’t need to get through your ISP.

> I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.

Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t have an issue with the billing arrangements I have with my ISP. I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. In an age of pervasive payment tech like Apple Pay, I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives.

I do still have the ISP-provided email address though, completely unused for the last 15 years and if they ever billed me separately for it, it would be terminated instantly.


> 1. [ISPs] could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service.

Just as they could decide which websites you can visit, but, outside of government intervention, they normally don't. Similarly, they could limit which MX servers could connect to the ISP's MTA server, but they don't (not counting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC). Why would that be different for usenet?

> 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.

Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] case that the SCOTUS decided not to consider. The 9th US Circuit court ruled in favor of Reddit. Both Google and Twitter went through similar cases[2] and both prevailed.

Would usenet fare any differently?

> 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one.

I don't believe ISPs were ever considered common carriers[3] and this includes the period where usenet and email were commonly included with ISP internet access.

> 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation.

After Eternal September, usenet continued to function relatively well up till the time the attorney general of New York threatened to sue[4] a number of major ISPs over child pornography on usenet (which would be like a user's ISP being sued over the fact that they have child pornographic images stored in their ISP email account's inbox folder). This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their bundled usenet service which led to a significant reduction in the number of people connecting to usenet.

> I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them.

Your ISP provides DNS services you can use to allow your computer to determine what server to connect to when you initiate a HTTP request with your web browser. You could choose not to use them and have your computer connect to an external DNS provider. Similarly, you could choose to use your ISPs MTA and have your mail client connect to it and issue SMTP requests to send your email to whomever you wish. So, if your ISP provided a NNTP server for your NNTP client to connect to, you can still choose to use another provider to connect to usenet.

> I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill.

ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.

> Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives.

I don't really see having to use third party service providers for every single service as a superior alternative.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/politics/supreme-court-twitte...

[3] https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/why-its-a-good-thing-that-bro...

[4] https://www.techdirt.com/2008/07/22/andrew-cuomo-threatens-t...


1. Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely.

2. That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause, but Title I and Title II are different parts of the 1934 statute passed by Congress under which the FCC claims its legal authority, and who they regulate and how they may do so.

3. Briefly under the Obama administration until they were reclassified again under the Trump administration, but I addressed it because of what you said here:

> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.

Re: DNS

DNS is probably a core service. Yes there are third parties but if I had to supply my own DNS service, an Internet service provider would not be a very good Internet service provider seeing as how their core function is access to the Internet. I’d like to see how long an ISP would last without providing customers with a DNS resolver though, that could be fun.

> ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.

Telephone, cable, home security and various streaming services they either own or have relationships with. Comcast even has an MVNO. We don’t live in a world where most ISPs are merely ISPs and a lot of them repurpose that infrastructure to provide other services. We don’t have to talk about ISPs in a vacuum.

Also remember the original context of my first comment in this chain. I was responding to this:

> I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.

I’ve re-read that a few times and wondered if I misread the spirit of this text and whether I should have replied the way I did or not, but independent of whether I have or not, please read what I wrote with the appropriate context when you respond. I wasn’t addressing whether ISPs did something, I was addressing the appeal of being billed this way vs on my credit card without the additional layer of obfuscation.

Put another way: ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing. We have a million social networks and even communities with paid memberships. When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.

There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation.


> Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely.

That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.

> That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause

That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet. Given the widespread use of encryption, ISPs wouldn't be able to tell whether someone is using a service over HTTPS on port 443 or some other application level protocol using the same port.

Though if ISPs did place substantial limits in their bundled usenet service, then people would choose other ISPs or 3rd party services and/or complain. Just as they would if their ISPcs SMTP server wouldn't send messages to certain domains or if their web browser was blocked from accessing certain websites.

> DNS is probably a core service.

The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required. Discounting TLS certificate validation, I could connect to a remote server using their IP address instead of their hostname.

ISPs used to provide documentation instructing the end user how to connect to email, usenet, and how to set up their router or computer to access the internet. This could involve access credentials, DNS settings, etc.

> ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing.

Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.

> When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.

That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.

> There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation

Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.


> That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.

I am not disputing the reason. You are correct about that. This is still an example of an enforcement action, or moderation, on the part of the ISPs. Just as an aside, that prosecutor was Andrew Cuomo.

> That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet.

No worries. And no, its repeal didn’t make much of a difference. If I’m remembering correctly, the Title II classification came in 2015 and this was undone in 2017, so not much time for the FCC to settle in and really do anything with their newly claimed powers over broadband service providers under Title II although it’s worth noting the drum beat of the pro-net neutrality crowd has been noticeably absent these past 5 years even with the change back which is certainly a change from prior to the Title II classification in 2015.

> The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required.

I was making a business observation, not a technological observation. An ISP could try to run their business like that. It would also not be a good idea if they intend to stay in business. Nobody signs up for an ISP expecting to BYODNS even though 3rd party DNS resolvers do exist (and I use one myself).

> Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.

That’s a personal choice. You can prefer that, but my argument against why I don’t is because I prefer as direct a billing relationship with my service providers as I can get. This offers me two things: direct insight into what every single line item on my CC statements is buying me and for what price, and also staves off the middlemen businesses that when they get too big for their britches more often than not try to exploit that status as the middlemen.

Often times middlemen are unavoidable or nearly so from an economic perspective in other contexts: a supermarket for example stands between me and the farmers. That relationship often gives them power over the farmers that can assist me in getting a known quantity in terms of item quality but may actually force producers to operate or behave a certain way. That’s meatspace though, literally and figuratively, but even in cyberspace given a choice, I prefer the direct relationship over the indirect one.

> That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.

As I stated above, I am not disputing the threat of a lawsuit. But if USENET was growing and a potential profit center for ISPs at that time, it would have been easier to make the choice to fight for it in court. A lawsuit isn’t a guaranteed victory for the one who brings it, but it wasn’t even worth defending to them, and in fact it had become a liability.

> Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.

As long as you are using someone else’s hosted service whether it’s AT&T’s pre-2008 NNTP services or Reddit in 2017 or Hacker News in 2023, your free speech rights are subject to the hosted service’s owners free speech and property interests. In a direct conflict on the service itself, yours loses. If it’s your server, then yours wins.

USENET in its heyday existed in a very different culture, legal environment and economy than today. USENET at only 1993’s scale can do just fine cultivating that same culture as before, but if all you want is the size of 1993’s user base that isn’t very ambitious, and it’s not like NNTP is a particularly nice experience compared to Instagram, Snapchat, Discord or really just name any social media service since 2004.

If you took 1993’s USENET and scaled it to 500 million users today, the same largely hands-off moderation policies of the cabal of hosts that provided users access to the service could not stand and they would have to change from that time, not because of specifically former New York prosecutor Andrew Cuomo, but because of pretty much all prosecutors everywhere they operate. Section 230 is a nice liability shield, but it can still be pierced with a good case.


So what you're saying is that we should bring back AOL :)


> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero […]

How expensive was Usenet if you took out storage/bandwidth for alt.binaries.*?


Cheap.

I mean, expensive by the standards of 1994, but -- inevitable comparison inbound -- a Raspberry Pi 4 has more CPU, more IOPS, more storage, and more RAM than many a 1994 small-ISP Usenet server. And modern Linux is a heck of a lot nicer to work with than any of the OS back then. A T1 is 1.5Mb/s, and if you don't take binaries, you would not quite fill that pipe back then.

These days, a $10/month VPS is not merely adequate, but luxurious for a non-binaries feed.


Still remember the times when T1 was only a legend I heard of, while running on my expensive (for my family) 56K.


My university got half of a T3 split with another organization in the early 2000s. Going home over breaks was such a drag!


It's an almost irrelevant question because as soon as most nodes would stop carrying alt.binaries, posters would no longer respect the convention that binaries should go there, because users would want the data regardless of what their provider wants. Them it's a cat and mouse game like everything else, where binaries would just be split up more and obfuscated more.

When the cost of storage and compute isn't really borne by the users, content limits are just challenges to overcome.

Maybe if there was a total messages or bytes limit per user it might prevent using it for binary distribution, but those are painful for users to the degree it might kill usage enough to kill any hope of it continuing.


bytes limits were overcome by segmenting rar files while including CRCs to overcome incomplete rar sequences.

sharing of binaries will always happen. even if it's just to include a cat image (we all know that's not all, but just sayin).


These days I think that isn't true anymore. There are a lot more ways to share files now, so if you threw up enough barriers people who want to do it would just go find another platform.

I'd be completely fine with a Usenet type of protocol that disallows file attachments altogether, adoption might not be huge, but maybe that's fine - projects like Gemini and Mastodon are valuable for me even if they're not replacing the WWW and Twitter.


I agree with this. Why go to all the trouble of getting around barriers when I could just post a DHT address of a trackerless BitTorrent swarm in a post?


https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink


I meant per user monthly or weekly byte limits by the people running servers and allowing access, not message byte limits. I'm well aware of how usenet worked, and the fact they can just split into an arbitrary number of payload messages was the point I was making earlier in that comment.

The only way you can stop binary usage is if you limit the demand, as if there's demand the supply will find a way.


yes, limiting the demand has also always never worked. ask the war on drugs how it's doing on limiting the demand


You can't limit what people want, but you can make them choose other avenues of getting it.

If you charge for transit on news server connections, people will naturally gravitate towards using it for lower size messages, which means they will go to unmetered connections for large downloads. Then not including alt.binaries in our server is less likely to have people looking for and utilizing methods to still get binaries through your service in different ways.

Theres huge differences in outcome based on how you attempt to limit demand. None are perfect, but just opting out of carrying binaries is the equivalent of the drug war, where they make the materials and transfer of them illegal. I'm not even sure how to stretch the metaphor to what I'm talking about, because the national policy on drugs and the drug war seems like a very poor fit.

A good metaphor might be the postal system. The old news system was like if the post office didn't charge per message or weight, just a flat monthly fee. Removing alt.binaries is like the post office then said they don't want you shopping g anything over 50 lbs because it's clogging all the delivery vehicles shipping large things. What I'm proposing is them giving you a total cumulative weight allotment per month you can't go over (or you get charges a lot). Demand will obviously respond to that, and people will opt for other methods to ship heavy things.


> they were simply borne by your ISP

Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)


By univs and research labs too, among others. Probably corps too.


ISPs in the 1990s often provided Usenet newsgroups. I had EarthLink dialup and had Usenet groups


They did up till around 2010 IIRC. The smaller ISPs had their own feeds, but eventually outsourced them. I remember the Path header containing the server name of the ISPs own NNTP server, but later it changed to supernews.

ISPs also provided email accounts and I believe some provided a server directory for you to host your own website.


> spam was unheard of

Eh, not exactly ;) There was (and probably still is where needed) an elaborate system of killfiles being exchanged among trusted nntp servers. Also, you might want to look up the origin of the word spam:

> The first time that the word ‘spam’ was used in this sense actually arose from an innocent-enough affair. In 1993, Usenet administrator Richard Depew was responding to a discussion group, but he accidentally posted 200 duplicate responses to the board.

(from https://www.mailcleaner.net/blog/spam-world-news/whats-the-o...)


Before 1994 usenet had trolls but what we recognize as spam today was all but unheard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam

In my .edu world the most annoying part of email was “chain mail” in which each recipient was threatened with bad luck or similar if they didn’t forward it on to three others. Email loops caused by .forward files were fun too.


Eh, I think the person you’re replying to would assert that Usenet thrived prior to 1993.

We don’t need a lesson about eternal September either.


your winking smiley face is condescending and annoying

edit: this psa brought to you by drinking half a beer


There was spam, for sure. There were also "kill files" for readers, which were immensely helpful in removing trolls from your stream. And there were some epic trolls, back in the day. Xah Lee comes to mind. He actually has an interesting website ( http://xahlee.info/ ), which I found recently when searching for a solution to an elisp problem. Yes, he was a troll on comp.lang.lisp.


Xah Lee falls into the "kook" rather than "troll" category. He was (is?) interested and engaged in the topics. I don't have the impression that he aimed to disrupt, or yank people's chains.


The group's tolerance for a troll defines the term.


Killfiles were a wonderful (if imperfect) thing. They basically let everyone be their own personal moderator.


Usenet started in 1980 and the first spam didn't appear until 1994.


Kill files were useful before 1994, as I used them to filter out obnoxious people, some of whom were trolls.


Right when the commercialization of the internet was permitted.

The fact that we did that in the heydays of neoliberalism so we fumbled the ball into this current trainwreck will probably be part of the history in books written 200 years from now


It's part of the history books now. Ben Tarnoff's Internet for the People is a bracing but very accessible history of this and the potential futures we let slide off the table. Highly recommended reading.


Let slide my ass, they were intentionally yanked off the table by monied interests. I distinctly remember my reaction the first time I encountered an actual honest-to-fuck ad campaign in an online space. Shock, followed my a grudging smirk at the novelty of it, followed by months of concerned chatter among the "netizens" I interacted with about what it would mean for the web if advertising or any other form of money scheme were permitted online, followed by dire (and entirely prescient) predictions of what the internet might devolve into if the floodgates were opened to the idle masses through mass commodification of connectivity coupled with a flood of bullshit zero quality content laid as bait.


By "we let slide" I don't just mean the initial privatisation of the internet or the web, which I agree -- it's hard to imagine any citizen was in a position to change that against the interests motivating it. Instead I mean the ensuing 30 years in which we've constantly ignored the warnings and analysis of e.g. civil society about the dangers of surveillance and data acquisition, devaluation and diminishing of trust in the fourth estate, labour exploitation and consolidation around platform capitalism, etc. because the toys those privatising forces offered were too shiny. At every point we've had a chance to say: no thank you. Or to build slowly and with consideration instead of aligned to the profit motive. Well, you can see it in this thread: we're at one of those points now but ostensibly well-informed people are begging for more software-companies-as-benevolent-dictators. We have a chance to channel the current energy of frustration into a new generation of the web guided by a focus on values like community ownership. Unfortunately the responses of many of my fellow technologists don't inspire much hope! But I still believe we can yank a few of those things back.


You'll get no argument from me on any point here. Arguably the greatest single travesty in recorded human history.


If the internet didn't permit commercial use, then it would lose another inter-network that did. People want to do buy things online and people want to sell things online and someone would step up to fill that need.


How would you forbid it?


At the time the restriction was on who was allowed to operate and for what purpose.

These types of restrictions in the real world are common. We don't permit say, people to set up shop running gambling tables inside of library reading rooms.

We have restrictions all around us like this. No picnicking on freeways, or say, hookers picking up Johns next to the paintings in the city art gallery. You can't just say, wheel in dirt to city hall and start tending a garden in the council chamber.

We decided to blow away all such equivalent restrictions on the web in the early 90s, being antithetical to any conventions. Maybe continuing to adhere to that, 30 years in, is not the best idea. Obvious guardrails, equivalent to no picnicking on the freeway, can be set up.

It's time to build more of a rules based online society


You make it socially unacceptable to run a server that emits spam. You make it socially unacceptable to work for a company that emits spam.

At an interview: "OK, I see you worked for an oil company, right, and then a porn company, fine -- oh, you worked for a spammer. Sorry, we're done. I don't know how this happened, I'll need to talk to HR about their filters."


socially where? where ever you set those social norms, someone will set up a server not there. like russia or any of the other internet bogeymen countries


The problem with that is to agree on what is acceptable social behaviour.

Trust me, lots of places would have issues with oil companies, others with porn and so one.


> 1994

> heydays of neoliberalism

please explain.


Wikipedia seems to have an adequate explanation:

Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism,[1] is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War.[2][3] A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them,[4][5] it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.


Also this was during the real halcyon days of the third way and DLC right after the end of the cold war.

The libertarian fanboys on HN really don't like it because this is what they furtively shake their pom-poms for and it's clearly trending towards a socially net negative

These hands off approaches will get a thousand flowers to bloom but they'll mostly be weeds


People who think that the robber baron days are to be aspired to frighten me.


It's fine in luxury industries. Yachts, jets, jewelry, cruises, etc.

But things that people with limited capital need? That obviously doesn't work. Look at the Cochabamba Water War or the California electricity crisis for good examples.

An unspoken rule of their models is all consumers value money the same and have an unlimited supply.

These assumptions fall flat on >99.5% of people.

But ruby and sapphire encrusted watches? fine! Game on.


Except Reddit moderators deal with these spam issues all the time.

Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale.

Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then admins mostly ignore those complaints. Moderators write bots that automatically surf traffic and try to automate... then the Admins come back and increase the price of API-access by 1000%, and then change the API and overall become hostile to this behavior. This cannot work either.

----------

At least in Usenet days, we could run our own programs in an open source model for these moderation issues.

I don't think Usenet would work. We need a way to rewind time (Usenet: once you post or once something passes moderation, it is forever more sent to everyone else's inbox). USENET was POP model, to put into email terms... while Reddit is IMAP/JMAP model, where the true state of the information is centralized to the server.

So yes, I agree with you that USENET will fail today. But the nuances of why it will fail are important to understand.

In particular: Reddit was never very good about these moderation issues. But with enough work and grit, the community came together anyway. That's good enough. I expect that USENET's moderation model is sufficient, albeit decades old. Its all the other USENET crap that won't work today (being a "POP"-like message distribution platform without any "takebacks", so no editing posts, no deleting porn that got past the spam filter, etc. etc.)

----------

Or maybe... USENET works with regards to API access. The *ARCHIVE* (ie: Google Groups, or Deja News if you're old enough to remember that) is where takebacks / edits can live instead.

So maybe Usenet can work, but with changes to our workflow to be more akin to 2023-level of features. By separating concerns over USENET (ie: how messages are distributed among a decentralized list of servers), and "The Archive" (which needs to be run by a trusted set of administrators), and a system where moderators will have access to "The Archive" for their own moderation purposes, we can rebuild Reddit through USENET??

Hmmm... it could work. Though I'm curious if it has much benefits over Mastodon or other solutions available today.


The reason Usenet can't work today is not for the reasons you surmise.

I used Usenet before the Eternal September.

The reason it worked back then, is because to a certain extent, it was a relatively homogeneous group of users, meaning, people of comparable education, interests, etc.

I'm not really interested in sharing a newsfeed with a kitchen cabinets spammer or a Russian troll or some MAGA trumpet endlessly gazing upon Hillary's emails, etc.

Also, the legal landscape is different today, we're a long way from a pre-DCMA world. Usenet servers act as common carriers but they are not legally common carriers (in my opinion) which means if I am right, the experiment will end as soon as someone decides to litigate against a server operator for passing on material that someone felt offended by. Not even copyright violations, just something they were offended by. For example, it is illegal to insult Ergodan (really) and while that law isn't enforceable here, it was elsewhere until recently in places like Germany which still had laws on the books saying it wasn't legal to insult foreign heads of state, etc. So it's just a big litigious mess now. You may have noticed the other year how the right-wing wanted to sue/shut-down the tech companies for being too woke and suppressing their free speech rights, etc.

Usenet was a lovely time and I miss it, but that ship sailed long ago and isn't coming back.


> Usenet servers act as common carriers but they are not legally common carriers (in my opinion) which means if I am right, the experiment will end as soon as someone decides to litigate against a server operator for passing on material that someone felt offended by. Not even copyright violations, just something they were offended by. For example, it is illegal to insult Ergodan (really) and while that law isn't enforceable here, it was elsewhere until recently in places like Germany which still had laws on the books saying it wasn't legal to insult foreign heads of state, etc. So it's just a big litigious mess now.

Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] of a similar vein that the USSC declined to hear.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear...


Re: homogenous user base and MAGA trumpets... in 1998 or so, when I did an informal analysis of USENET centralized moderation vs Slashdot distributed moderation and number-of-posts/day counts across both platforms, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh was one of the highest trafficked USENET groups. The proto-MAGA crowd was there.

USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?


> USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?

My Usenet was fairly homogenous, because I only subscribed to a handful of groups. You simply couldn't read the traffic on 100,000 groups! But the full list of groups was extremely diverse.

The list of groups also depended on which server you were using as your feed. Many servers carried groups dealing with some product the operator sold; those groups weren't always relayed by other servers. In fact I guess that's still the case.


Basic tech needs to be redone.

Assuming moderation can be automated using the recent advancements in AI


AI is nifty but obviously too expensive for now.

We can't just assume that hackers around the world have 80GB NVidia GPUs laying around to run high-end, usable LLMs. And we certainly can't expect people to pay Amazon Web Services for a rented GPU, those things cost significant amounts of money.

Sticking to basic automation tools we have for spam filtering and automated reading of messages and the like, lets start with Reddit-level tools of just banning, blocking, users. And a global effort that helps kill spam accounts and sockpuppets.


> Assuming moderation can be automated using the recent advancements in AI

You're joking right?


https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation/overview

It's not a bad start, but it's missing "trolling/shitposting".

(I'm hardly advocating that people start relying on openai for moderation, rather it would be great if people started figuring out how to do this locally with the tools we have. Their bias against chess players is pretty despicable)


A lot of the tech/approaches are already used elsewhere. Some ideas

1. Require university or employer emails to register (Blind uses this). Still post via alias but have a verified root email tied to a person IRL, would really cut down on the trolling and spam and nonsense.. NEETs might be out of luck but, well, their domain is the imageboard and that's not exactly what you want on usenet most of the time..

2. Require some hashcash style calculation to prove the value of a post via computation. Use an algorithm which is ASIC resistant - maybe Ethereum's old PoW?

3. as you mentioned AI - Moderation endpoints, it would be interesting to see if that can be created from LLaMA or such (OpenAI has this available but no reason to become dependent on them). People have mostly been looking at them for generation but as a classifier they also may fit the bill


> where most of us trusted each other

I think the "trust" back then was really just because only people with a certain amount of money could afford a computer and internet access. Most people on the internet at that time were middle class folk with proper day jobs, or in my case, a child of the aforementioned.


Data storage would be a big question and a design goal for something new and decentralized.

Back then it was mostly text and files were much smaller.

Now average image floating around is the size of a cheap USB stick.


A "usenet 2.0" that only does (short) text and links/embeddings for media (to youtube etc) would already be a very useful thing, notwithstanding the risk of take-down of controversial media (freeloading on Big Tech infra for the 99.9% that isn't).


Is this not just the existing decentralised social networks etc?


I fear you might be right. But somehow, HN is a counter-example?

I rarely even see a bad joke, because we’re a self-selected sample of people who care about the edges of professional computing.

So I say, why not?


The average person has no idea what 90% of the headlines on HN are even referring to, giving it a degree of self-moderation.


And the average person also doesn't know the website exists. You have a few layers of public knowledge:

Twitter, Facebook, etc - everyone knows them.

Reddit, Discord

HN, presumably other domain-specific forums, IRC

Fediverse (though less so as of late), lobste.rs, presumably many that I don't know about!


>And the average person also doesn't know the website exists.

Taking the larger number of people outside of the US that only use mobile devices and only use apps like FB, WhatsApp, or others I'm not familiar with, I'd go so far as saying that the average person doesn't know websites exist. If it's not present to them via an app, could they find an actual website (or at least would they even attempt to)?


How do I get an invite to lobste.rs


HN has a lot more powerful and strict moderation than Usenet ever had.


HN has shadowbanning, sockpuppets, etc... all the goodies that have been privately demonstrated to work, and work well; and most of those work even better when combined with a pretense of 'not having that here'


That is disgusting.


IMO the key adavantage HN/Reddit has over Usenet is the upvoting/downvoting, which is a clever form of self-moderation. Doesn't work in all cases but the less useful comments and posts never rise to the top.


Even within Usenet, this was readily acknowledged [0]. The forums and social media that followed were, in part, trying to solve exactly these problems.

I genuinely think that the current inheritors of Usenet are private group chats; trust based, relatively small groups.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September


Usenet had moderation schemes that weren't widely used, but that worked well in the groups that used them. I remember a system called STUMP though I don't remember what it stood for. Basically posts had to be approved by moderators using PGP signatures, and I think there might have been a CA-like scheme for moderators to delegate moderation authority. It seemed well designed and generalizeable, but it was near the tail end of Usenet's heyday, so it didn't catch on much.

Added: to expand, Usenet was and is mostly unmoderated. There were a few groups that wanted or needed moderation, and for those, workable methods came into existence.

Mostly, anonymity is good: https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan


This. I loved usenet, but when the spam started, that was the harbinger of doom. Maintaining communities costs time and effort as well as servers and bandwidth. Given the thankless task of fighting the onslaught of spam, trolls, raids, organized information ops etc it's not viable as a volunteer exercise in general. It can be done by mutual cooperation and self-policing on a small scale in isolated groups of like-minded folks but en mass the incentive to ruin the commons for everyone else will always be too strong for some folks.


Nothing was ever free. Even Usenet. Universities and Internet savvy corporations ran Usenet servers. That’s why it was free to the rest of us. I tried running a Usenet node in 1995 or so on a 486/33 getting a feed from UC Berkeley. Had to learn quickly about expiring posts and groups. Could not buy enough disk to keep up but it was fun and exciting in a stressful way for the few months it lasted.

Server<->Server communication requires technical chops to manage attacks at different levels of the protocol stack. So very few or no individuals today can run “news” servers. But organizations - that is entirely still possible. Most likely universities and companies that you might see represented at IETF meetings and protocol working groups.

Other than recreating the old Usenet, there is also the possibility of localized wireless (including LoRaWAN) communications networks. These could optional gateway to a global backbone even a UUCP-like store and forward one.

IMHO, the challenges are at least two fold - how to marshal the resources to sustain such a network and how to make it resilient against hostile attacks/deliberate blockage by gatekeeping


> spam was unheard of

Spam started on Usenet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

There's always these bright eyed and bushy tailed asses who can spot a clean pond to shit in.

Make a buck making everyone else's life worse, tough shit. What are you going to do about it?


The internet is a lot like our planet. Humans are actively working to destroy it for their own short term gains. The only way to defend against that kind of behaviour requires energy, time, and inevitably the abstraction that represents those things - money.


I think it can be possible, but only as a closed community of people who have all been vetted first and who, most importantly, can be can be banned for bad behaviour.

Setting up such a network might be profitabel (lots of people spend quite a bit of money networking), but it is also going to be very expensive and you are going to get a lot of negative press from people whom you didn't accept and from people who will point out that you are discriminating against certain groups because your user demographics over or underrepresents certain groups.

It is never a nice job to be the one who has to man the walls, and it is not glamorous, but no Constantinople without the Theodosian Walls.


Usenet worked fairly well when you could really only get there by knowing someone. No commercial ISPs, so if you got banned, you really could face penalties at your university (I know because I was a witness at a student trial involving doing things they shouldn't on the Internet - not Usenet specifically - and while it was in no way criminal, the students were sanctioned). And you couldn't just open up a new email account with a new provider and ISP five minutes later.


> for free

Wasn't that sort of included in your Internet subscription?

Even if not, why not use the same model as Internet subscription, where the payment comes from the fee you pay to your ISP? This would also make it easy for governments / donors to sponsor participation in such groups as they wouldn't have to hunt down individuals to provide them with a tiny amount of money, rather they could compensate ISPs directly.

A lot of ISPs are trying to make some extra $ by selling all sorts of junk, like anti-virus or w/e. Sure they wouldn't be opposed to sell an extra service, should it become popular enough.


I think I agree. There has to be a cost. I cuts down spam and raises a cost for mildly the mildly annoying.

What if, and this is based on the principle of making it cost something, crypto got incorporated into the idea effectively forcing one to pay to send a message on a given forum.

Hardly perfect, but with one of the anonymous coins it might not be a bad balance ( assuming we can get past the current slew of news that battered crypto ).


I am not a crypto fanboy but I fully agree that crypto is as close a solution as we have today. Some degree of elitism is needed to keep the community safe and self-moderating. How about a crypto platform where you pay to post but also pay to subscribe? The economics of it need to be worked out but it can’t really be a one way street or only advertisers will send messages. If my post helps you then you should pay me, but if my post wants you to help me then I should pay you.


I wonder. In a sense, it would be a replication of the current follower system, but with money following it more directly ( the bigger the forum, the more admin would be paid; and each member would have some skin in the game and a cost associated with each post likely reducing unnecessary behavior ). Like you said, the economic details need to be hammered out, but maybe it does not sound as ridiculous as it did not that long ago.


Enable blocking users and don't surface random content. That's all you really need. Everything else is either a waste of time or infantile moralizing.


You haven't used Usenet mate if you think "spam was unheard of". Honestly.


The Green Card spam was considered the start of Usenet spam, and that was 1994. I was on Usenet for a good 7-8 years before that. Things were different back then.


>traffic was an order of magnitude lighter

I think this is the elephant in the room that most "resurrect usenet" proposals ignore. Usenet hosting has coalesced around huge providers because the volume of binaries traffic presents a significant challenge, namely that you need beefy, expensive server infra to manage the traffic and retention.

The "next big thing" after Reddit won't be a plain text-only service. HN and Tildes already serve this niche. So any proposal for USENET 2.0 must provide a treatment of the bandwidth/data retention issue.


Perhaps, but HN only satiates the desire for a text-only forum for a pretty niche community. There are plenty of subreddits that don't really touch on anything tech related. Insofar as binary content goes, Supernews is still around and charges about $12/mo (they're currently running a half off promo).

Sonic's ditched their NNTP servers as they move from being an ISP to a web provider, but back in the day they provided their own NNTP servers and included a Supernews subscription.


I've been trying to remember Supernews all day since talking about it in another thread, but too busy to stop to look it up. Honestly, I'm shocked they have remained a thing.


Do the new-internet from Pied Piper. Everyone that uses the app "donates" space to the network with IPFS or something


What's my incentive to host someone's 5TB of pirated Community episodes?


Because you have 5TB of every episode of the simpsons on the same network. don't act like you don't


Why not just independent forum sites like 1998-2008. I was a member of 10 or so very specific forums where I could get expert advice very quickly. That is in the rare event that my problem hadn't already been discussed in great detail with highly detailed walk throughs.

Then each of those forums had a marketplace where you could buy pretty much anything relevant to that interest at great values with scams being pretty much non-existent and any disputes that did arise carried out and mediated in public.

And all the forums had off topic as well where politics and other things were confined.

Oh and advertising was limited to a few banner ads at the top of pages and various plugs in people's signatures.

Lastly, I could get all the relevant updates from the sites I was interested in with a nice orderly rss feed customized to my liking.


Since independent forums never went anywhere, you have to ask yourself why Reddit still "won". In other words, if indie forums are so compelling, why didn't they prevent the success of Reddit?

Single sign on across a bunch of forums was always a holy grail. Users don't want to register for 10 forums either. I remember EZBoard (a free forum host in the early 2000s) had an EZBoard Gold membership where you paid monthly for SSO across all EZBoard forums instead of having to register on each forum.

Traditional ads (Adsense) are pretty much dead on forums except for breaking even + pocket change. And unless your forum attracts a lot of guests, you're stuck in the position of showing increasingly crappy ads to your own users, and of them the few users not running ad block. It's kinda cruel.


Single sign on to a host of boards is Reddit's power. The ability to share a variety of interests in one place is fantastic, but it assumes the site owner will be open to your interests forever. They aren't and cannot be.

Federated approaches continue to prove themselves to be the most resilient, if not the easiest to use options available.


No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators.

I am subscribed to several specific interest email lists. The information I get there is typically much better than what I find online.


That's fine. As long as you understand why other people might not find email lists to be the peak user experience.


> No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators.

Do you also prefer email lists over a moderated newsgroup? If so, why?


A moderated newsgroup would be OK; I tend to treat email and news (back in the usenet heyday) in a pretty similar way. Both are text-based messages coming to an inbox where my client application can sort/filter/present them to me in a way that I like. I find the experience of a listserv/mailman style email list and a newsgroup to be pretty similar. The key in both cases is that the protocol is open, I choose the client, and I choose how to manage the messages (beyond any moderation that may exist).


Why can't an email list be moderated? I've seen several that very much were.

OTOH your own moderation by just ignoring certain senders may be relatively efficient even if nobody actually controls the list server, and the whole thing is just a bunch of peer-to-peer messages with CC large headers.


They can be. There are (at least) two ways to do it, one is to have a moderator review and approve messages before they get sent on to the list members. This might be done for a while for new members until they demonstrate good faith participation, or for posts with attachments, etc.

The other is banning members if they misbehave.

Neither approach is foolproof, and ultimately it's up to the list members to ignore any messages they don't like. One difference with online forums is that it's not possible to recall or delete a message after it's been sent out.


1. Advertiser revenue dropped like a cliff in 2008 era. Facebook advertisements were far more valuable than AdSense whatever from your smaller forums. Today, you will never have the revenues of the 90s or 00s era, and likely never again as long as Facebook and Youtube have eaten up the bulk of advertising eyeballs and dollars.

2. Moderation back then was far harder. There was far more spam to deal with those forum-sites back then and moderators had to work harder than today. Yes, we got trolls and other such moderation issues. But 90s / 00s were just filled with penis-enlargement spam and other crap that no one wanted. If you didn't see this, it was because your moderators were excellent (and likely overworked).

For this "moderation" issue alone, I'm convinced we need shared-identity systems like Reddit or Twitter, where an admin-level ban can quickly clean up spam. We have "higher-level" moderation problems now, but at least we've evolved past the manual-labor level of spam cleanup.

> Lastly, I could get all the relevant updates from the sites I was interested in with a nice orderly rss feed customized to my liking.

3. Twitter beats RSS feeds in terms of advertising revenue. If you're aiming at an advertisement scheme, you ain't beating the "new web".

Without advertising revenue, you ain't rebuilding the 90s or 00s. And you won't get advertising revenue, because today's 2020+ era of websites are far better at drawing eyeballs than any no-name forum or phpbb instance.

Open Source projects can host a Discourse or other instance due to community donations. I'm not sure if typical groups on the internet today are large enough to self-fund (heck, even popular open source projects have issues self-funding their discussion sites or email lists).


I can't speak to ad revenue, but I helped with managing some large ~100k member forums and the cost wasn't by any means prohibitive. Costs today would be cheaper by a couple orders of magnitude. Spam wasn't a big problem either. Basic filters, and mandatory intro posts and post count restricted forums solved most issues. Moderation was much more focused on keeping things in topic and redirecting duplicate topics.


Yeah you can easily host a phpbb or vbulletin or whatever still exists these days on a single dedicated server (ovh or hetzner) and be able to serve 100k MAU for about 50-75 USD/month.

Hell, for less than 10k MAU you can still get away with shared hosting if you're really strapped for cash, 5-7 bucks per month.

People around here really lost perspective of what can be accomplished with a dedicated box and a PHP forum.

You don't need kubernetes to handle 12 AWS instances in 3 regions, with S3 storage and distributed RDS with a side dish of lambdas to run your 45 microservices.


Few people seem to need custom-run forums when a plethora of subreddits exists! It's the network effect: everyone interested will head there, because they know that everyone else interested will head there.

It's relatively harder to make your forum even known among potential interested users on the background of the entire Web, while you have a much narrower search space within reddit.com. (Widely popular Facebook groups also exist.)


The quality of information on reddit or facebook is so inferior though. It's really disappointing. I think it's a combination of youtube, reddit, facebook and instagram. That interests are spread out and each of those is individually vulnerable to spam for purposes that have nothing to do with the actual topic.

I'm in a carseat facebook group, and people constantly post engagement spam, I'm really not sure to what end, but I assume it somehow makes other facebook posts visible. Then there's the run of the mill scams that hit all kinds of networks.

"My Autistic Son loves 'Yamaha Boat Outboard Motors' and made these T-Shirt. Please take a look and let him know what you think, he loves comments~~~"

Then I get tons of youtube videos for topics that have all the keywords I need but are literally not even working on the same vehicle or problem I'm looking for, but of course you can't figure that out until 3 or 4 minutes into the video.

The few dedicated sites I'm still in that are active are far and away better than their reddit /facebook/ instagram /discord contemporaries. Though have still declined from the 2000s.

At least you can search reddit with google. Facebook you can't find anything, sometimes I can't even find the groups that I'm a member of.


Agreed, we need to get back to independent forums.

And there are better techniques to sustain them now, compared to back then. They don't need to be plastered with banner ads.

- Annual donations with Stripe checkout, etc

- Job boards

- If you have a product/service, host a community that caters to your general industry! For instance, if you sell film editing software, host a forum for hobbyist and professional editors, and don't make it specific to your software. You'll make conversions over time, and it's win-win for everyone. HN is essentially a form of this.


A ton of these forums actually still exist, especially for expert-level things. Reddit is great for memes and echo-chamber text content, but its awful for things like detailed guides on how to do some niche procedure on your old car or detailed discussion on niche things like the intersection of the latest in construction engineering on home performance and home DIY. A lot of these old forums (to this day!) even bubble up to the top of Google.


Yes a couple of them I've been on are still around but quite a few are a shell of their previous activity and some have disappeared entirely. I think people, myself included, are too easily distracted by the quick hit proposition of sites like reddit and Facebook. I would spend a solid 20-30 minutes daily catching up on some forums without really encountering something of interest. It was more like watching a rerun of a favorite show. My actual dopamine generating activity was in real life putting the things I learned on the forums to use.


Agree 100%, which is why I started one. The link is in my bio. I was inspired by someone else on HN who did the same.

Small, close-knit communities are always the way.


The solution to a lot of problems is simply to not scale platforms past something like 1000 users. At that level, you can have a community that is guided by individual people and their relationships, rather than anonymized and centralized. And the infrastructure is much simpler to set up and maintain: we just need more tools tailored to being easy to set up and administer at this scale.

m15o has built a ton of examples along these lines. There are other communities and tools too, loosely referred to as the "small web"/"smol web"

https://lipu.li/?u=m15o&p=projects

https://runyourown.social/

https://github.com/cblgh/cerca


There was an Ask HN (or similar) a while ago where someone was saying that they run a Discord server for active and committed independent game developers, and they were asking if anyone was interested in joining (I can't remember exactly). They wouldn't let just anyone in, to get in you had to schedule an interview with the moderators and show that you were a committed game developer. They were a tight community who shared experiences and helped each other. It sounds great.

The problem for me (and you) is that I'm not in it. The problem for a high school student who just wants to learn is that he's not allowed in either. The problem for most of the world is that the great insights within this community are forever hidden.

Perhaps small communities could nominate generally useful conversations and have them released as blog posts. At least then people could watch from the outside, while the community still remains small and private (not everything would be published).


communities can be both exclusive and publicly readable! I know many such examples


So make it viewable and read only.


Most of these platforms are highly opinionated—-colors, buttons, text to dissuade or attract users of one specific kind.


> Perhaps small communities could nominate generally useful conversations and have them released as blog posts

This, maybe less formally but no less in practice, was unironically the killer social feature of Google Reader.


The problem with small communities is that you don't necessarily have enough competent and available people to run the system reliably. Or worse, the people in charge leave, sometimes taking the servers with them, and no one else knows how to maintain it.

That's why Reddit and Discord are so successful. You can create your small community for close to zero cost and zero technical expertise, no one is going to pull the plug on the server because the one guy responsible for it didn't pay the bill, if the server in question is not an old PC in somebody's basement with no backup.

Even with good tools, building a community server still relies on an individual or a small subgroup to make an investment in money and time for the entire community, and if they stop doing so and no one wants to take over, the server is gone. On a platform like Discord, as long as there is any one person in there, it will continue running, the platform keeps the community accessible and does basic administration like spam filtering for free, even when there is no one to care, it can do that because it pays itself on user access, though premium membership and ads.


> The problem with small communities is that you don't necessarily have enough competent and available people to run the system reliably. Or worse, the people in charge leave, sometimes taking the servers with them, and no one else knows how to maintain it.

Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge these are problems. But I have so little faith in big platforms these days that I don’t really see an alternative.


It may solve some problems, but it also cuts off the possibility of a GREAT deal of good. I get that it's hip to bash social media et al and its problems, but I believe that it's been instrumental in exposing and combatting a WIDE range of endemic problems in the world, e.g. police brutality.

"Big" spaces are important too. Maybe more important if we're trying to avert global disaster.


The problem is that then platforms come along and vacuum everything else up.

Reddit and discord sucked in and destroyed a whole lot of phpbb.


Sure, they vacuum things up, but people have agency. They choose to use platforms. They can choose to use different ones. I can't influence every person's choices, but I can choose how I invest my time and social energy, and present an alternative for people who are alienated with existing platforms (a very large and growing population)


This is a little atomistic view, but essentially in the correct direction. I would also add we need to nurture anti-centralization and anti-corporate sentiments that are still springing up in younger people especially, in their own way. If alternatives could bestow perceived social prestige for at least parts of the population, this would help preserve islands of free discourse for the future.

To be sure, this doesn't mean proclaiming decentralization to be cool necessarily (...fellow kids), but trying to be open-minded and friendly to the public, which I consider to be the actual better part of the ethos of the early Internet era. Being tech literate is "esoteric" by itself, and some complexities and social contracts cannot be really taken away from that, not without going back under the centralized yoke. But even moreso we should be trying to make it a little better by our attitude.

Even if a regulation of protocols for utilities will come, assuming it will be good, we need society to remain willing to preserve it.


The problem is, a lot of the platforms that I've liked over the years have been vacuumed up. I still try to use different ones, but it's a lot harder.


Personally most my moves away from online platforms over the last 3 decades years have been been because community owners have massively fucked up.

I think Digg did it worst.


I miss BBSes, Usenet, EFnet, Puzzle Pirates, and a few web forums.

They all kind of exist, but they were mostly supplanted by bigger, more centralized things. All of them had a part in their own demise, too.

Then in turn those bigger, more centralized things have tended to screw things up.


But phpbb had its own issues. Many were run by hobbyists who eventually stopped paying the bills or updating the site, and then some bot steals the data or breaks the database.

It's like cloud-hosting email: everyone wants to not host their own email server, but then you're at the mercy of the service provider. For most people its worth it... until it isn't.


Here we are, all pretty happy on our anonymized and centralized HN.


With far more than 1000 users.


Stop using github!


I would really like to see collaborative software development done via a usenet newsgroup. The git send-email program could be updated to send cover letters and in line patches to a newsgroup, and people could reply to those messages and review each patch.


USEnet is alive and well, thanks. It doesn't need resurrecting; it never died.

I have a free account on Eternal September:

https://www.eternal-september.org/

I use Thunderbird as my client. In T'bird >100 you get mail, including Gmail etc via oAuth, including calendar/contacts/tasks, you get News, and you get chat over Matrix. All in one app.

It badly needs spam filtering for its NNTP client, but it works a treat. Runs on Win/Lin/Mac just fine. Sync between instances is coming real soon now, MZLA claims.

I wrote about it:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/new_betas_of_firefox_...


Same here with Thunderbird but I use these guys; https://Usenet-News.net

They are not free but they have a nice payment system; "A "Block Quota Account", or just "Block Account" instead means a pay-per-gigabyte account with no time limit;"

I do not use it much. I keep the alt.privacy subscription for the occasional jewel.

Thank you for the link!


Thanks for NNTP mention.

As an analogy a lot happened to HTTP and other protocols to increase user experience, better content deliverability, and control.

Can this be done to a modern NNTP protocol?


> As an analogy a lot happened to HTTP and other protocols to increase user experience, better content deliverability, and control.

On a protocol level, do you have any examples of what you're referring to when you say "increase user experience, better content deliverability and control?" Based on what I understand of the NNTP protocol, it allows for pipe lining commands to retrieve data, allows multiple, and persistent connections, and some commands will instruct the server to send compressed responses.


A simple HTTP example is content compression.

A header communicates whether the incoming payload is compressed and the algorithm used.

Backward compatible!

Better bandwidth utilization.


> [Thunderbird] badly needs spam filtering for its NNTP client

It already has the capability to filter newsgroup posts based on header and/or message body content.


When AOL came to the Internet it was seen as the apocalypse. But really what killed the internet is spam and scammers. They followed the public because that's where the money is.

The problem that's fundamental to the Internet is something nobody wants to say, So I will: the people suck. Not everyone deserves a voice.

The comment sections on WaPo, the NYT, and DailyKos are just as bad as the worst parts of 4chan. And nextoor/facebook? These people are whacked out.

Usenet worked because it was a sub-elite; in the golden era people in usenet were college kids, the highly educated, etc. and even with that there was more self selection, because you needed a computer and the ability to read and write text. And connect to it, which if you weren't in a university was quite difficult.

Is anyone willing to build a service that's got elitism built-in? Clubhouse sort of did. But it needs to be said: allowing anyone to post means dick picks and moderation.


If you make it elite you’ll still have dick picks and moderation. Just less of it.

It’d be interesting to see if you could add selection criteria that both scale (automated) and are unable to be gamed (read the answers from some website).


I think you nailed it. There’s two parts: 1) educated users and 2) self-/mod-enforced culture. So far, HN hits both. However, even HN is starting to upvote puns, engage in group-think, etc.

To fix this you must moderate strongly or only allow material that attracts educated individuals.


We desperately need something like this to happen before it's too late. We are dangerously close to a total corporate stranglehold on digital free speech. The current generation of kids coming to age are growing up in a world where they don't even know a time when you could say whatever the hell you wanted to online. If we don't save digital free speech now it's gonna be lost forever.


You can still say whatever you want online. You just can't guarantee an audience, but that was _never_ the case.


Just make your own financial system bro


> You can still say whatever you want online.

This is definitely not true anymore, but if I cite examples I will as always get flagged by people assuming I support said people/communities.

The age of being able to say whatever you like online is dead when your ability to even host your own site can be removed.


> This is definitely not true anymore, but if I cite examples I will as always get flagged by people assuming I support said people/communities.

You can say whatever you want on servers you control, just as you always could.

You can't post obscene or extremist content on other people's mainstream platforms, but that's always been the case. Reddit / Twitter / etc are really no different from AOL / CompuServe / etc decades ago in this respect. The difference is that the former are now orders of magnitude larger than the latter ever were, so it feels more painful to give those audiences up.

It's a cliché, but you're not entitled to an audience, and you're certainly not entitled to Reddit's or Twitter's audience, particularly if you get in the way of their corporate aims of serving mind-numbing ads over blandly inoffensive content to placid masses. You can now, as you could always, try to build your own audience. It won't be easy, but it never has been.


> You can say whatever you want on servers you control, just as you always could.

Increasingly not true, because you can never control all the services you have to use. Servers are one thing, but you still have to rely on ISPs, cert providers, payment processors, and all that other good stuff.

> You can now, as you could always, try to build your own audience

I'm not speaking of Reddit or Twitter, I'm talking about a fairly controversial website, Kiwifarms. That site is proof enough of what I'm claiming.

The internet isn't what it once was and the "create your own" argument ignores the realities of keeping a site online and accessible.


> This is definitely not true anymore

If it's political, you can still post it to alt.politics on usenet and not have any issues with any central authority.


I can't tell whether you're joking, wilfully misinterpreting the GP, or something else.

The past few years have highlighted some of the suboptimal machinations of our society, like collusion between government and media to silence domain experts who don't agree with a dominant political narrative[1].

The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want--the corollary is that I should be able to read whatever I want if it's being said. The relationship between me and people speaking is being manipulated, so, in that sense the ethos of free speech and the internet is broken.

The conclusion is that, no, in fact, you can't say whatever you want online. Saying that you can't guarantee an audience (without more context) makes your statement seem pejorative, as though the speaker feels entitled to an audience. The GP alludes to the free exchange of ideas, which your statement seems to ignore.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files


> The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want

According to whom? There are plenty of ways that has never been the case. In historical terms, its precedent was in enabling covert comms across large distances. In cultural terms, arguably its ethos is to facilitate the operation of the economy. In technical terms, its ethos is the segmentation and transmission of data. Insofar as you can even reasonably ascribe an "ethos" to machinery, in what avenue do you see this ethos of extreme freedom of speech? Because it sounds like you're saying a promise was broken that was never made.


It must be my grognard roots. The bulk of my on line participation is in long running, old school, private (i.e. hosted by a very small concern hosting ads for hosting money, vs some large entity, most anyone can join these should they so wish), "phpbb" style bulletin boards that focus on the niches I enjoy. I am not active on any "large" social media sites, save for, perhaps, StackOverflow and it's sub-genres (and even there, not much).

It's disappointing I can not find such forums for all of my interests, but I muddle through and get by.

Obviously I'm a minority of 1, the populations of all these sites in terms of active, posting participants, is well south of 1000. Maybe south of 100...that's hard to say. I don't know how much reach these sites have in terms of lurkers watching us old folks quibble, but some of them are well known in their genres or communities (both geographical and internet-wide).


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)

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/ARMM.html


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


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.


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.


reputation is a lazy filter.


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


There are still a number of discussion email lists around. Riseup hosts a bunch of them for example:

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/


Wow thank you!

So my idea is basically an alternate front end for email that would act as a social media platform.

Spam theoretically could be handled by filtering out any messages that aren’t from a list of users, which might be all platform users, verified users, or users within the network of the recipient.


Working on the client sounds good too! Your anti-spam idea would work for one use case of social media, friends and family keeping in touch, but as soon as some of the participants don't know each other that is not enough. Even using regular email you can't primarily rely on email providers to manage spam since they will block the list if there is too much spam, although initial moderation of new list members should often be sufficient. Encrypting the email to the recipient might or might not help with deliverability (but would be a good idea for privacy), but if it does that would make your system more attractive to spammers.

Reliably seeing all messages that your friends and family (or anyone you follow) post would be a big advantage vs many current social media sites but regular email providers would defeat that by randomly sending messages to spam (which you could fix if you provide the client) or rejecting or disappearing them (which you can't).

I think an email provider that aimed at the "keeping in touch with friends and famnily" side of social media might be able to do small-scale well. I think a big part of the issue with email is that most of the end user providers seem to view email as something they must provide but not something they care about, only the marketing/transaction email providers actually care about it with few exceptions (and those exceptions seem to still be stuck in the past; it is depressingly difficult to find a provider with a reasonable set of features even based on what could easily be provided today).


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.


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.


we have delta chat built on email, and it has a few broadcast lists and things, but its tiny


https://join-lemmy.org/

Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone. It already works and is available. As far as I know currently the best alternative.

Please, join a smaller instance currently. The biggest ones are already overloaded.


I wish there was something else.

For building a coherent community federation is a bug not a feature.


Federation makes it easier for users to join. If you don’t need that, there are plenty self-hosted alternatives. For example, HN itself.


How exactly? Ever federated project has all this faff about "which instance should I use?". How is that possibly easier.44


Here is how the comparison looks to me: Assume you are a HN user and you heard about this interesting lobsters community.

Case 1: Different website, create an account there.

Case 2: ActivityPub vision, search for !lobsters, click join

Case 3: ActivityPub now, go to website, copy URL into your own instance, search returns nothing, try again minutes later, join.

I fully agree that Lemmy is currently not easier (case 3). Users understand multiple accounts (case 1) but managing accounts, they do not. I belief eventually the Fediverse will be easiest (case 2).


Just join one. Portability is inherent to the software. If you don't like it, move to another one.


Yea, extra steps. Confusion. Uncertainty. The exact opposite of easier.


Registering for a website is not something most people find so mystifying. Short of being willfully obtuse, I would imagine most people who express discontent with online communities could exert the most cursory of efforts to understand how to do it. Typically it involves visiting a URL and then typing in an email address and a password. Please pass this on if you come across anyone struggling to comprehend it.


Getting into a federated space brings a lot of questions for normal people. Why this instance? Why not this instance? Can I only join one? What if my friends join a different one? This one only has 100 people, is it weird if I join? This one has 1,000,000 million, isn't that basically Reddit/Twitter/whatever?

These are the sorts of questions that come to mind for normal people. By the time they've asked this pile of questions they've already decided it's not worth the hassle of finding the answers


As people positioned to understand this stuff, we have a duty to explain it to people if we believe it will have a positive impact on society. I'm not oblivious to the fact that lots of people have lots of questions about decentralised social media, I'm saying the answers can be very simple. That should be enough to realise that the fatalism some people seem to experience in the face of this new technology only exposes their own intellectual laziness -- not the confusion of "normal people" and not the insurmountable complexity of that technology.


The political views of some of the major developers (tankie, pro-china, castro-profile-picture communists) has put me off lemmy, particularly because they're (allegedly) removing anything critical of Russia/China and promoting genocide denial on their instance.


I've heard of more politically neutral instances like beehaw.org - places like that might fit you better.

There's also kbin, which is a newer alternative to Lemmy (and possibly less political?).


Whenever someone complains that a certain project or community harbors toxicity or right-wing views, the standard answer on HN is that should't matter, software should be judged strictly on technical merit, not politics.

So start up your own instance with blackjack and hookers if you like, federate with whomever you want.


The "standard answer" is to swallow a poison pill. The legacy is problematic and cannot be separated from.

But, then, HN trends Utilitarian in the extreme, with its Libertarian roots.


No. It is developed and run by tankies. This is a poison pill. See https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379


Lemmy is evil because the devs host lemmy.ml and it links to the lemmygrad.ml instance which is evil? Too indirect an argument for me.


I wonder if some of those commenting actually used USENET. I did, for years. Don't remember how long.

USENET had many excellent corners as well as places where you could witness or, if desired, participate in, full-on fecal matter throwing contests. Not sure why people think it was some idyllic environment different from anything seen today.

The key thing to understand is that people are pretty much the same. The masses have some really unique personalities that seem to come out and flourish in front of a keyboard.

I used to think that anonymity was the culprit. It obviously isn't. I have seen some awesome (not in a good way) feces throwing contests on Facebook in groups devoted to our neighborhood and town. In other words, people who are not at all anonymous and very likely run into each other and even send their kids to the same schools.

Mark Twain's observation still holds true today:

“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”


> USENET had many excellent corners as well as places where you could witness or, if desired, participate in, full-on fecal matter throwing contests. Not sure why people think it was some idyllic environment different from anything seen today.

I was fairly late to the game, but by the time I was on usenet, it was _mostly_ full of spam and flamewars, with only a few "moderated" groups being of value. (And even those tended to be populated mainly by, shall we say, "outspoken" individuals.)


The eternal September is living proof that no discussion system can scale without robust moderation. Usenet worked when it was a handful of academics, students, and professionals. Once the average Joe got access it went downhill in a hurry, especially on the groups that had the broadest appeal. rec.music was hopeless, but rec.music.classical.guitar would probably be pretty good.

Even Reddit shows this, with the default (the ones you get if you don't login) subreddits being a sea of trash but a lot of value to be found in the more specialized subreddits.


The only people who would be willing to sign everything and build a web of trust would be a handful of academics, students, and professionals. I wonder if that could act as a gateway.


I think PGP proved that the Web of Trust is not a scalable concept.


While true, the idea in this case would be to deliberately keep things small.


It's not a technical problem. It's a social problem first and an economic problem second.

The social part: the "internet scale" and the scale of "largest group who can keep meaningful relationships" are incompatible.

The economic problem: ad-based models have misaligned incentives. People can not vote with their wallets, so every content creator, media property or social media network defaults to the lowest common denominator. And the number of people willing to pony up the cash to help things happen are simply not enough to make it sustainable.


This is the core of the issue. Many would-be competitors to Facebook over the years would lean on the technology aspect as if the average person would care. There's nothing wrong with a decentralized system if you can actually make it work better than the status quo, but many individuals implementing these systems get too caught up in the tech and not enough on the distribution and user acquisition.


The issue with moderation is that not everyone agrees. Moderation should be plug-in and multilayer. Everyone should be able to choose which moderation they trust or distrust.

Full p2p is technically complicated and does not work well for small devices not always connected, we should keep servers to host the discussions.

The servers should be able to subscribe to a moderation. You don't want to host a discussion illegal in your country gor example. Users should also be able to move servers painlessly. If the users trust their servers with their identity, it does not need to use crypto for user identity. On your profile page on a server you can link other servers identity and that's enough and simpler.

If a discussion group is private, it should only be hosted in servers of their members and not elsewhere.

I started working on such a system https://github.com/mildred/disputatio.nim but beyond the technical stuff I have no idea how this could gain adoption.


I've been toying with similar ideas lately (haven't we all..) and I was thinking of also making user identities distributed. Or rather you create your identity, for example a DID, locally like an SSH key. Then similar to trusted lists of banned users you would also have trusted lists of verified users. So if I want to be verified I have to find a trusted verifier and complete their process (e.g. captcha and an email, or even a full passport check). This would also allow connecting accounts to actual people across the system.


I sure hope that more and more areas on the greater web keep getting decentralized/federated...because all this centralization is for the birds! Over the years, any content that i have posted on such centralized platforms, i consider ephemeral...and if its lost, either i already have my own copy, or i don't care (it would be content that i care less about, etc.). Of course i say that, but really it would be others that might suffer from, say, some essential answer that i provided like on stackoverflow, and then when that answer is gone, i will be ok, but others will suffer. I'm by no means a fountain of answers, i'm just proposing an example scenario. To tangent a bit, this is why the intent of projects like SOLID [0] sounded so good to me: everyone has their own somewhat copy of interactions with each other, ensuring tha at least to some degree there is preservation of valuable content among members of a community.

[0] = https://solidproject.org/


Someone created a Usenet-like thing on IPFS. https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84

It's kind of dead. IIRC the dev put that on the back burner in favor of a new BBS-like app. https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem


My nostalgia for the ancien internet is deep and abiding, but it does not extend to actually wanting to use Usenet again. Usenet was never a good solution, it was just the only solution for a long time. So, to the extent that the proposition is for something that is Usenet-like, my vote is no. If you're saying "should there be a better, decentralized Reddit that is not garbage like Usenet" the answer flips instantaneously to yes!


I find that this nostagia is mostly to who was on that internet, rather than tech at the time.

By far much less monetization or ads so far less SEO spam (and so less need for moderation and/or spam filtering), minority of population so not much political campaigning aside from personal conversations about the topic, more technical people etc.


I mean, that’s why HN is still great right?


No, because you could just run Usenet and nobody wants to.

What's always been hilarious about the controversial nature of giant social media companies is nobody has ever been forced to use one. It's not like the monopoly of telephones or roads or municipal water or anything else you have no choice in and still need to live. Social media is 100% optional and there is always another way to do what you need without them. The fact that they exist is merely humans not being able to control their urge to simultaneously be entertained and socialize. You might as well complain about TV.


As far as I'm concerned, the "new web" (Reddit, Twitter, etc. etc.) #1 ability that was not present in "the old web" (USENET, IRC, etc. etc.) is universal identifiers.

If a problematic user on Reddits r/news gets banned (spam or whatever), there are admin-level bans that can ban that user at a global level. Allowing unrelated moderators on one subreddit indirectly-help moderate on other subreddits.

Shared global identity across the network is key. We can't have sockpuppets spamming one subreddit (or USENET group), and then have to be individually dealt with group-by-group. These sorts of moderation efforts must be shared.

Mastodon's model is to have servers responsible for their users. I'm not convinced that this model scales well, especially into the future as servers grow less trusting of each other.

---------------

IMO, what is needed is a DNS-like solution for identities, and proving your identity. Not a real identity mind you, but a pseudo-anonymous identity that has enough trust that people know you're not a spammer.

Yes, modern sockpuppets can pay a 3rd-world country to create innocuous accounts en masse and get around this, but we need to be at this level (or better). Without this level, we're back to just automated account creation bots spamming our servers with spam.

----------------

This DNS-like identity management server needs moderation decisions to be shared. Not necessarily trusted mind you, but shared enough so that "Moderators over in X-location believe this identity to be spam". Or "Moderators over in Y-location believe this identity to be a troll".

EDIT: Other messages, like "Starting on June 2023, it appears that X-identity has been compromised and is now a spammer. Ban messages after this. Starting in July 2023, it appears X-identity has regained control of their identifier and we can stop banning their messages." Lots of useful moderation messages that need to be shared.

Maybe its up to individual communities whether or not "troll" or "spam" classifications of identities (or if the moderators at Y-server should be trusted at all: maybe a hostile group of moderators start putting up fake complaints about masses of users that they don't like). Etc. etc.

-----------------

But the overall goal is to create a mechanism where moderators are sharing effort and working together. Reddit accidentally provided that, and that's why it was better than USENET. That's probably the only incremental improvement that mattered in the long run.


> what is needed is a DNS-like solution for identities

did:dns perhaps: https://danubetech.github.io/did-method-dns/


We have global identities-- IPv4/6 address. v6 moreso than v4.

I'm aware of the problems with CGNAT and v4, but [TEMPORARILY, as a cooldown!] banning IPs does work. With as many people as there are on the internet now, it's surpassed the ability of a handful of moderators anywhere to deal with. AI is too expensive and the first solutions are just going to involve everyone piping every comment, post and submission through OpenAI for free training anyway. At some level OpenAI will be perversely incentivized to hire spammers to drive business for themselves by pushing sites past free-tier usage.

Collateral damage may well be the solution to curtailing abuse in the future. For IPv4 for the most part, only individual users' IPs should be affected unless they're part of a botnet, but when nobody can use any site because trolls have gotten entire telcos' IPv4 space banned, at some point the trolls are going to have to accept what their impact is and change their behavior because other trolls are impacting their own ability to enjoy anything. Socialize the abuse and crowdsource punishment (not normally my thing, but we've tried everything else). If you shit where you eat, expect shit in your next bite. When someone brags about pointless mischief, rather than being cheered on as some kind of rebel, they will get a lesson in socialization. They will be outed as the reason why nobody in their country can access 4chan anymore and be dealt with.

This doesn't work while we exempt M247's address space because "normal" users insist on using the same infrastructure as trolls and cybercriminals, exempt all of Tor because there might be a gay user in Iran who can't keep their mouth shut, or refuse to block the IP of a problem user in the Philippines because it's shared by everyone in Malaysia. Accommodating exceptional people (no sarcasm, in the kindest terms) has made things exceptionally insufferable for everyone else.

This will drive fragmentation. It is a good thing. If one person can get all of Malaysia banned from Reddit 2.0 or whatever, after everyone is denied for long enough it will drive creation of smaller, local communities instead of massive, centralized ones. This is what we want, right? The most dedicated troll would have to do actual work to find, infiltrate and harass every single offshoot community that develops as a result. The cost of trolling is now borne by the troll, not the responders. It also increases the cost and effort involved in surveillance. Right now, if you want to track anyone, start with a FAANG product and work outward.

Within a generation, we became afraid of punishing anybody for any reason, so small wonder the lunatics are running the asylum. The internet fucking sucks these days. It feels like a mental hospital-- sterile, boring, with crazies everywhere screaming all the time threatening to kill everyone or themselves. Basically downtown Atlanta after hours, just with less piss flowing everywhere. If we want the old internet back, play by old internet rules. IP addresses are just numbers, ASNs are not people and the women are all men. Don't accept traffic from problem sources. Ignore the complaints unless they're from people helping to pay your hosting fees.


> We have global identities-- IPv4/6 address. v6 moreso than v4.

Nope. My identity, as a concept, doesn't change if I'm at Burger King, Starbucks, at home, or at work, or if I'm using a cell phone, or my Sister's computer.

Emails are the closest thing we have to a proper global identity. But it wasn't enough in practice. Reddit gives us a "Reddit" identity across a huge number of subcommunities.

Tumblr, MySpace, Xanga, Discord, Twitter, Facebook... the primary "killer app" that all of these give us is this identity.

Emails are insufficient, because a spammer can create any email address they want, and there's no way for us to share which email addresses are spam with other "allies" on the internet.


Agreed.

Of course, emails are also insufficient because people don't want to use them as their identifier across sites which is why your account email is private on every social platform and only used for internal notifications and forgot-my-password.

People don't want a global identifier that connects every utterance they have across the internet with the same identifier they, for example, send job applications from.


This is a great refresher on how the usenet forums were organized including the top 8 groups, and then winnowing down to specific ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet


I dearly miss the golden age of Usenet, I still keep an eye on some groups and use GMANE as well.

The Fediverse is the closest thing we have now. It's not perfect but it's ours.


Energy and Information go hand in hand, the relationship being Entropy. Just as nobody is going to say, "Hey, free decentralized energy for everyone, come and get it" without people at least wondering, 'what's the game here?', well, information - in the form of a high-quality site full of reliable information and real people and interesting conversations - well, that's like an oil well just sitting there waiting to be grabbed by the first party that can gain control of it. It's like saying, 'hey, free land for everyone!' - well, the supply of land is not infinite.

As things stand in the USA, the government generally is controlled by oligarchs who view decentralized independent information systems as a threat to their continued grasp on power, much in the same way that decentralized independent energy production outside of state or corporate control is viewed.

There's always the French Revolution approach to the problem of consolidated oligarchic power, but then you get Napoleon, which isn't much better. A difficult problem to solve, indeed.


There seems to be real need for a public digital infrastructure that Reddit and Twitter satisfied. I believe they're largely the same thing, as both enable threaded discussions in a tree structure. Twitter of course is famous for its character limit, but this just leads people to create endless threads. And that limit has been softened at least twice.

We don't give important infrastructure into the hands of single corporations (at least not without massive regulation) for a reason, so it should be similar here.

But as we all know and have seen from Mastodon, federated solutions suffer from multiple issues:

* moderation

* spam

* infrastructure

* discoverability

* ease of onboarding

* deleting content

I believe that the governments have to ease at least some of this. They build streets, canalisation, and so on, because we deem it essential. So they should at least provide some of the hardware for our digital town square.

So maybe something like usenet, a network of nodes that synchronize where at least some important nodes are run by governments.

The other points appear to be hard problems though.


I’d certainly like to see a return of the UX of Usenet, nothing that came after equaled its effectiveness. Unfortunately, that UX is difficult to translate to mobile devices, because it basically requires to be keyboard-driven.


> Unfortunately, that UX is difficult to translate to mobile devices, because it basically requires to be keyboard-driven.

There are GUI NNTP clients that could be adapted to work on a mobile platform. Thinking of webmail clients, you could do something very similar in terms of article selection, replying, new message, etc. The only think that would need to be accounted for is posting replies incline and with proper text wrapping.


Who is trustworthy, and how would I personally ever be able to determine that?

For the purposes of deciding who gets to communicate, and what is deemed worthy communication, no human being is trustworthy. Myself included. If we allow anyone to "run" it, then we will end up back where we are now in just 10 or 20 years. But each time we go through the cycle, the tyrants and busybodies and free speech minimalists and the other assholes learn a little more about how to oppress and strangle and bury and muzzle. And too many times through the cycle and I think they might actually perfect those skills.


This comes up time to time, See discussion of Robin Sloan’s “Spring ‘83: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233412>

And “Fraidycat”: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878>

I do think there’s a maximum size of any online community beyond which it loses its value.


All users should have seen this coming, for years they poured their life inside those free digital platforms, made a digital life with digital friends, and feel all cozy inside because of their digital followers.

At the time of Usenet, things where different. Those who remember brought many lessons from those times, but something to consider is that the vast majority of the user-base of nowadays' services never had to deal with a fax modem, P2P connections, and nothing out of the 'really basic'. A lot of the same people who are now calling to 'decentralize' things uses a proprietary OS on their phone that probably listen to them and they do not care about it. They do care about their life online, about the void it would left in their lives if it was all over. Those users want comfort, babysitting, somebody to take care of spam and bad people from their line of sight.

Decentralized services will not work for the masses anymore simple because they learned to be in the comfort, and they will always prefer the service who offer the most of it. I really wish to be wrong, but i do not see this being possible on such decentralized services where people have to take care of themselves and actually learn a bit to use some services.

The solution for this issue is very complex, and would require a complete reeducation of those users for a new way of interacting online, in my opinion, or else it would be for nothing. The mess has been made already, backup everything and let it die. New services should still be created, but to cater to new users and people who actually knows the importance of this move, trying to recreate what already exists is a waste of time.


We just need a copy of reddit but with better management. Have a barebones UI like this site so that it runs on minimal hardware and then just pay for it with donations.


Yeah, anyone suggesting decentralization or federation is completely missing the point. Kind of like when people were blindly pushing blockchain to be used in software architecture.


I think when the centralized owner of a site has decided to fuck up the site in a way that pisses off a lot of users, it's reasonable to look to solutions which are resilient against that. If a particular Usenet peer decided it wanted to stop carrying comp.*, well, there were plenty of servers that did have it. If a peer went offline, the posts it originated were still out there, by nature of the protocol (well, up until everybody had decided to expire them, but archives also exist...)


> 3. These forums should encourage less anonymity and more persistent communication.

Why should this be applied to all of the groups/forums? I thought Facebook already showed that the whole "Anonymous people act worse" thing was bullshit, shitty people will be shitty people even if they have their real name attached to it. It should at least be up to each community to decide if they want to allow anonymous users or not.


Also don't forget what happened to Usenet. At first it wasn't archived anywhere (disk space was expensive then). That was ok, people treated Usenet discussions as ephemeral and said things expecting them to not be dug up later. Then a nonprofit called Deja News started archiving them, causing some limited consternation, but it was a useful resource and offered an opt out to people who didn't want their stuff saved, so fine. People came to rely on Deja News, and... Google acquired it, and it became part of Google Groups, which got worse and worse to the point of now being useless and irrelevant.

Usenet is not completely dead, but it's a shadow of what it once was. Certainly revivals should keep the strong and weak spots of the past in mind.


Usenet is still alive and kicking. Mailing lists still exist. Go subscribe to some and start contributing.


I checked some comp.* groups recently and it's all spam


> Go subscribe to some and start contributing.

Such as?


comp.sys.raspberry-pi


I think we should dig a little bit deeper to find a thing worth resurrecting. What worked in FidoNet and earlier networks was the social organization, not protocols. A usual way to enter a net was to get a point level address from someone with a node. You had to know the person in the real world, and the person had to vouch for you. Your actions could have jeopardized the whole node, so there was a certain level of accountability.

I don't know to which level this element is resurrectable though. Why would one want accountability if there is internet where there is none?

The technological side is secondary. You can make an hierarchical network on mail protocols alone with a simple echo script.


I blog and journal using GitHub README.md. It's a low tech solution but if everyone did it, everyone would have content to read.

Just need someone to curate repository URLs.

If you want good content, you need to invite users who are known for insightful informative comments.


> It's a low tech solution but if everyone did it, everyone would have content to read.

Except the people Microsoft unpersons.


Anonymity and trustworthiness are actually different concerns that only appear to be in opposition. For example, if someone you trust asks to bring a friend to your party and doesn’t mention their name, it’s probably okay, right?

For this kind of situation, a network of some kind like a bulletin board, you have someone you only know via that board but you’ve known them for years and never known them to play up, and they ask to let someone join and will vouch for them, is that a problem?

This is the kind of problem Keybase was trying to solve, and they were right, social proof is more important than unmasking anonymity.


https://freenet.org/

https://join-lemmy.org/

https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/

https://getaether.net/

I think Freenet/Locutus contracts that work like forums on Aether (with auditable moderation and elections) would be neat.


My problem with Aether is its emphemerality. I respect the devs and community for wanting it but part of the appeal of forums/usenet/reddit is being able to search through old posts.


I've sketched a few ideas for what you'd need to make Usenet, ah, usable given modern concerns (primarily spam and spoofing). The biggest takeaway in my explorations is: you could probably never really get mass adoption of a Usenet-esque system these days. Oh well. Anyway:

I'd start with the basic idea that identities matter. For any given message, you should know what user posted it and from which server. It doesn't matter if the user is Robert Smith posting from smith-family-server.net, or Leet Hakkerman posting on darkweb.io, every message should be signed by the author ("the person who owns this public key wrote this) and counter-signed by the server ("my user, who owns this public key, did indeed submit this message to me"). Separating out individual identities (user's key pair) from the server means you can switch to another server and say "hey, it's me, i'm over here now" and it's verifiable -- but of course requiring people to manage key pairs is a tall ask.

Once you've got that, you can start doing things like setting up your server to just drop any messages from a server you consider abusive, or configuring your newsreader to drop messages signed by a particular user. "Nymshifting" is still possible, but it takes the cooperation of a server owner to do it, and it means the server might find others unwilling to peer with it.

Ideally, as people proposed with Mastodon, servers should be small; the admin should never answer "who??" when you mention a user on their system. But like a lot of decentralization/federation ideas (see Mastodon), these schemes fall apart quickly as soon as the usual thing happens: one server goes up which makes registration easy & anonymous, thousands of users flock there, and everybody else has to decide if they want to drop the server which generates 50% of traffic on the network.

edit: part of the idea of making it look a lot like Usenet except that your servers are verifying signatures throughout is that you can just use regular existing newsreaders to read it. The servers might exchange messages in the "native" format via a slightly modified IHAVE command, but when a newsreader connects and asks for an article via the ARTICLE command, the server can parse & rewrite the article to present it in RFC1036-compliant format.


Could you solve/mitigate it with curation? Let the users be anonymous or pseudo-anonymous and keep the server signing, but add another signing field called the curator.

At first blush the curation signer looks the same as the server, but I think its subtly different in a way that is maybe effective?

A) You can re-curate or multi-curate a message, but you should (probably) keep the source community constant

B) It separates moderation concerns from on-topic concerns which is a constant struggle. Easy for a server to host many different communities/topics/communication mores and import the content stream in different ways from different curators

Who does the curation? I guess its as simple as the upvote button, but perhaps you can improve that model substantially


> given modern concerns (primarily spam and spoofing)

"modern concerns" go way past spam and spoofing.


Usenet was designed with a model of sporadic connection. Every site had a copy of items in its subscribed groups, and would refresh them from its upstream servers periodically.

This is a good model if connectivity is scarce or expensive, but inefficient if it’s pervasive and cheap.

Starting to use Usenet again (since it hasn’t actually ever gone away) doesn’t really make sense. It is a product of a different set of preconditions.


> This is a good model if connectivity is scarce or expensive, but inefficient if it’s pervasive and cheap.

The web is absolutely packed with data duplication, every CDN ever keeps a copy of everything in serves in multiple locations. There's nothing wrong with duplicating data. So long as there's some agreement on the uniqueness of a message it doesn't really matter how many times it's duplicated in the network.

It's actually an advantage because it means multiple parties can maintain backups of of messages and reconstruct conversations after the fact. If some central source of threads goes down it can be rebuilt from partial copies. It's the reason DejaNews even had extensive Usenet archives for Google to purchase.


80s nostalgia never ends. Usenet was cool back then, now it's dead. Not lindy. I prefer online forums. Web forums allow rich and structured content. There is an app, Tapatalk, if you crave reddit-like experience. The UX of some old-school engines is not the best but online forums are way more approachable and manageable than Usenet ever was.


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