[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?
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Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?
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.
Author : indus
Score : 109 points
Date : 2023-06-09 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
| hattmall wrote:
| 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 the rate 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.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Usenet is still alive and kicking. Mailing lists still exist. Go
| subscribe to some and start contributing.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I checked some comp.* groups recently and it's all spam
| uLogMicheal wrote:
| How do you get the users? The third-party apps had the
| opportunity to collaborate and start with a massive userbase, but
| instead they choose to shut down. Odd.
| allarm wrote:
| Nothing odd about it. These apps are frontend; building a
| backend of a reddit scale is a completely different task.
| ilyt wrote:
| Not enough time to spin off an alternative. And I wager most of
| them thought reddit will back off.
|
| If it was known to be inevitable and unchangeable for last few
| months I can see few of the apps cooperating to run
| alternative.
| [deleted]
| scrame wrote:
| 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
| shadowgovt wrote:
| In the post-truth era, (3) will become increasingly vital
| because reputation is the only tool we have to distinguish
| signal from noise.
| scrame wrote:
| and reputation is what, reddit karma? fb likes? prom king?
| blue checks on Twitter? FORMER bluechecks?
|
| Its the opposite of an open platform to rank people by the
| same social media stuff that OP is saying doesn't work
| because it still wants a centralized form of reputation.
|
| You can't resurrect the old usenet the way OP is talking
| about because he doesn't know what usenet was.
| indus wrote:
| reputation is a lazy filter.
| indus wrote:
| Choosing to be anonymous is one thing but not verifying the
| identity is another.
|
| Why do we favor content from anonymous identities that
| disrupt the flow---is a big question running as mods for
| communities.
| bckr wrote:
| And why don't we just build stuff on top of email?
| scrame wrote:
| how many accounts do you have require an email address for
| contact / verification?
|
| would authy or okta be better? they for sure require an email
| address.
|
| would a decentralized usenet that requires me to be bob
| jones/125 nonce st/cleveland be better for me the user or..
| whatever the hell this proposal is?
|
| Why should I send my passport or birth certificate to some
| random server on the internet?
|
| fighting spam is an issue that I addressed in my first
| comment.
| bckr wrote:
| 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.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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.
| __d wrote:
| 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.
| samsquire wrote:
| 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.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| 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.
| AmenBreak wrote:
| Naaaah, Usenet still works great. Last thing Usenet wants is a
| bunch of nosy moderators enforcing their views on everybody. Just
| use Reddit if you want a padded room and straitjacket safe space
| experience.
| camgunz wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about this. Us engineers periodically
| think some version of "I'd like to put a text box on the
| internet, and hmm, maybe, yeah, _some_ way of storing and
| retrieving what someone else put in it ". Sounds like another
| endeavor in a grand tradition of such endeavors.
|
| Everything else past that has _insane_ ramifications. Do people
| put threats in that box? Do people put personal information in
| that box? Do people link to CSAM in that box? Do people link to
| radicalizing videos or viral misinformation in that box? Do
| people use this to harass and stalk others? To manipulate stock
| prices? To manipulate elections? The answer is "yes" to every
| single one of those things. You used to think it would be nice if
| people used your service, but now you realize to your horror you
| run a Nazi bar [0].
|
| This is the question of the web now: how do you deal with Nazis?
| You might disagree, you might think it's about
| centralized/decentralized or analytics or JavaScript, but the
| only reason those things are relevant is Nazis.
|
| Don't forget there are two kinds of Nazis. We probably
| immediately think of the American History X Nazi, but don't
| overlook the respectable Nazi, the polite, well-groomed, non-
| tattooed Nazi. The Nazi with a bachelor's, or even a law degree
| or an MBA. They'll use your service too, in ways that might seem
| like speech you should allow [1] but is just the first Nazi
| walking into your bar.
|
| We gotta stop thinking "I'll put a text box on the internet" and
| start thinking "I'll figure out a way to keep Nazis out of text
| boxes on the internet". This sounds like a huge task but, and I
| want to be clear: this is _table stakes_ for any new service. The
| thing you're building isn't a text box, it's a Nazi-free text
| box. This is the bare minimum.
|
| Then, and only then, can we start building tech that starts to
| make us feel good about ourselves. That starts to address the
| loneliness epidemic, or the bonkers decline in adolescent mental
| health brought on by social media (don't--ironically--@ me on
| this one), tech that inspires us and brings us together instead
| of tech that isolates and depresses us, tech that respects us and
| our privacy instead of surveilling and exploiting us. We have to
| start thinking about what our tech will do to people when people
| start to use it, from 10 users to 1000 users to 1,000,000,000
| users. We need to start taking responsibility for the things we
| create, it's no longer possible to just throw your hands up and
| say, "look I just put a text box on the internet, how was I to
| know blah blah blah". We have to know better.
|
| [0]: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-
| swiftly-k...
|
| [1]: https://kottke.org/16/11/the-14-features-of-eternal-fascism
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| jstarfish wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > 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.
| jsz0 wrote:
| 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.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| You can still say whatever you want online. You just can't
| guarantee an audience, but that was _never_ the case.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Just make your own financial system bro
| whartung wrote:
| 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).
| joezydeco wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| indus wrote:
| Basic tech needs to be redone.
|
| Assuming moderation can be automated using the recent
| advancements in AI
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hunter2_ wrote:
| 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.
| mirkules wrote:
| 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!
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > 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.
| e40 wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Killfiles were a wonderful (if imperfect) thing. They
| basically let everyone be their own personal moderator.
| dn3500 wrote:
| Usenet started in 1980 and the first spam didn't appear until
| 1994.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| SllX wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > 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.)
| vram22 wrote:
| By univs and research labs too, among others. Probably
| corps too.
| nvy wrote:
| >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.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| 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.
| b33j0r wrote:
| 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?
| skrause wrote:
| HN has a lot more powerful and strict moderation than Usenet
| ever had.
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| 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'
| cmpalmer52 wrote:
| The average person has no idea what 90% of the headlines on
| HN are even referring to, giving it a degree of self-
| moderation.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| 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!
| gregw134 wrote:
| Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a
| blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.
| stubybubs wrote:
| Well have I got an LLM-based solution for you, my friend.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I was one of those people.
|
| I still think that holocratic/syndicated moderation is worth
| trying as a social experiment. I also still think that
| centralized moderation as a single source of truth is the
| meta-debate in online spaces.
|
| However, since the wind is gone from the crypto-sails, I
| don't think it's practically viable over short and medium
| timescales.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I still think that holocratic/syndicated moderation is
| worth trying as a social experiment.
|
| Well, I doubt many people would argue against that.
|
| The blockchain arguments weren't really about that, though.
| They were about whether or not a specific mechanism
| (blockchain) was an appropriate one to achieve that.
| graypegg wrote:
| Unrelated to the root post, but I'm so glad that time is
| over. There was a ~1year period where it was nearly
| impossible to have a conversation about solving something
| that didn't involve someone scheming about how to reframe the
| problem as an economic model, and then drown out everyone
| with some half-baked tokenomics concept as a way to "solve it
| all!". It really felt like a step backwards in critical
| thinking for people that I did (and still do, now that
| they've chilled out) respect for their problem solving.
| ok123456 wrote:
| What about critcoin: a block chain based smart contract
| that incentivizes critical thinking.
| ilyt wrote:
| You forgot about obligatory "actually, using normal proper
| database would make that solution be far more simpler and
| faster", and impending silence from whoever proposed
| another blockchain garbage... or alternatively a slew of
| comments where the blockchain fanboy slowly learns how DBs
| work and how the fancy things in blockchain are possible
| without it for 30 years now.
| graypegg wrote:
| "Wait... I'm seeing column constraints in this white
| paper for PostgresSQL you sent me... how do we make this
| trustless??"
|
| Exaggerating... a little bit
| notpushkin wrote:
| I still think you can use economics to model pretty much
| any human interaction. The problem is, you can't just slap
| a token over everything and call it a day - the incentives
| that drive people are way more intricate than that. On that
| note, I think many systems will function better without
| blockchain. Trust was driving the internet (and any other
| distributed human networks) for the long time - long before
| Ethereum came in.
|
| Hugs are worth more than handshakes.
| graypegg wrote:
| You can also model any problem as a hydraulic circuit if
| you want.
|
| There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger
| that will break any economic model.
|
| If HN had some internal-economy model where you were
| cycling around karma as if it was currency, paying
| upvotes into new posts to get a return back for your
| "early upvoting" if they do well, giving you more capital
| to spread to other new posters... I know exactly how the
| dynamics of this site would change for the worse. People
| just post here (free work!) because it's interesting. How
| irrational!
|
| There's some merit to the idea that you need aligned
| incentives. I'll give you that. Just doesn't always need
| to be directly boiled down into units of exchange.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > reframe the problem as an economic model,
|
| Every social problem can be legitimately solved by throwing
| more money at it[1]. That is, effectively, an economics
| model.
|
| Corollary: Every economic solution can be improved by
| _removing_ blockchain from it :-)
|
| [1] Sometimes you have to throw the money at people who
| will spread your solution, sometimes you have to throw the
| money at media to spread the solution, sometimes you have
| to throw the money at campaigning, etc.
| bitwize wrote:
| Relevant Penny Arcade, literally 22 frickin' years ago:
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22/magic-its-
| what...
| dheera wrote:
| > 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.
| indus wrote:
| 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.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| 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).
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| 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 ).
| Demmme wrote:
| Usenet was not really good and is technically very simple.
|
| I don't think there is a simple solution people could just move
| to.
| throw2022110401 wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| awad wrote:
| 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.
| depingus wrote:
| 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
| WallyFunk wrote:
| Usenet was kind of sketchy though (and still is). If you browsed
| long enough you started discovering very niche and outright
| illegal shit on your travels. Then you had Usenet proxy services
| who censored that stuff, and for the better. I don't want to
| access sketchy shit accidentally or have it anywhere near my
| hard-drive.
| ilyt wrote:
| That's inevitable price of freedom of speech.
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| 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
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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).
| indus wrote:
| Most of these platforms are highly opinionated---colors,
| buttons, text to dissuade or attract users of one specific
| kind.
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| communities can be both exclusive and publicly readable! I
| know many such examples
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| 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.
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| 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)
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| abricot wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| indus wrote:
| 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
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Does it? People have been free to communicate. They are still
| free to communicate via a different platform. There's no "risk"
| here. Those companies have investors who expect the companies to
| make money. Any different organization is going to sit there and
| expect to pull in enough to at least keep the lights on, but
| while people find it a worthwhile thing to donate to the
| Wikimedia foundation, I don't think you'll find that they'd do
| the same for Reddit 2.0.
|
| > 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.
|
| We HAVE Usenet. Maybe figure out why Usenet was abandoned by most
| people before replicating something that is broken and doesn't
| work for discussion.
|
| > 2. The model needs to be rethought to ensure that the thoughts
| and knowledge of communities and users belong to them.
|
| This is literally useless and so far down the list of concerns of
| users that it only makes sense to the exact kind of people that
| other people hate to encounter on forums.
|
| > 3. These forums should encourage less anonymity and more
| persistent communication.
|
| LOL.
|
| > 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.
|
| This is a lie. Unmoderated newsgroups absolutely thrived in the
| heyday of Usenet while the other groups withered on the vine
| because nobody wanted to deal with the steel-fisted asshattery
| that was Usenet moderation. Reddit moderation is light-years
| better than Usenet's ever was, and that's not even talking about
| the fact that Usenet was designed for an age when people
| connected to the internet 30 minutes a day and didn't have
| powerful, permanently connected computers in their pockets.
|
| > Failure to address these issues allows mega companies to
| exploit data and control access against users' wishes.
|
| Mega companies are going to exploit data and control access
| regardless of what else happens because there's value there.
|
| > Taking action is crucial to prevent unfavorable outcomes and
| hold ourselves accountable.
|
| Taking a step back and realizing that Usenet was an epic failure
| for discussion would be a good starting point.
| mxuribe wrote:
| 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/
| mnd999 wrote:
| Usenet still exists.
| robomartin wrote:
| 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."
| bityard wrote:
| > 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.)
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| qznc wrote:
| 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.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| I wish there was something else.
|
| For building a coherent community federation is a bug not a
| feature.
| qznc wrote:
| Federation makes it easier for users to join. If you don't
| need that, there are plenty self-hosted alternatives. For
| example, HN itself.
| TylerE wrote:
| How exactly? Ever federated project has all this faff about
| "which instance should I use?". How is that possibly
| _easier_.44
| eternityforest wrote:
| Lots of people keep trying but they have a ton of problems.
|
| I have done a lot of research and thought about this quite a bit.
|
| * For a long time P2P automatically meant crypto. I'd rather
| Google use my data to get richer than Bitcoin bros waste
| electricity to do the same.
|
| * Many were laboring under the delusion that self hosting is a
| sane idea. Anyone who's ever self hosted anything knows it takes
| actual effort and sometimes money, and probably won't be as
| reliable as Facebook.
|
| * Protocols that are immutable-first are bad. You should at least
| be able to try to delete your old embarrassing posts.
|
| * Normal people do everything on mobile. It's just so much better
| of an experience than any desktop OS. Add a keyboard and Android
| is the perfect device for basic stuff. P2P devs don't usually
| support mobile.
|
| * Bandwidth is a thing. IPFS still uses too much of it. Helium
| used way too much last I checked. Disk wear and CPU is also a
| thing.
|
| * Centralized servers are really good for performance. I think
| that an ideal platform probably wouldn't use any kind of DHT or
| anything, it would use a combination of local discovery, and
| semitrusted servers that are separate from your actual identity.
|
| * Federation as seen today isn't that meaningful in practice. If
| my identity is tied to a server, there's only one server I'm
| going to consider choosing. The biggest most popular one that
| might stay around the longest. Might as well just do centralized
| FOSS at that point.
|
| * You need a killer app to make normal people who aren't in it
| for political reasons use your thing. If you don't have that,
| your app will become KaczynskiNet, and I'll just ignore it,
| because... nobody I know will want it and I probably won't be
| able to convince them. Free speech is a good thing, and the
| "controversial" platforms might have a valid place.... but I'm
| not going to spend much time on platforms almost entirely full of
| communities I'm not part of and don't agree with, there's not
| enough hours in the day for that.
|
| * Endless scrolling is evil and sent to instantly kill any idea
| of persistent communication. It does not belong anywhere but a
| news feed. Even pagination isn't ideal, we should probably be
| using time-based "Next N records after $date" pagination.
|
| * I believe it also may subtly cause low grade anxiety by
| removing reference points and causing content pages to feel like
| they could change at any moment
|
| * The current social media model developed around centralized
| servers. Things might have to change a bit.
|
| * Heirarchal nested threads do not mirror real life
| conversations, and complicate the UI a lot, and make it easy to
| miss stuff if you aren't familiar with how stuff works.
|
| The protocols involved are Not That Hard. It's been done several
| times, just never polished. Retroshare, BitTorrent, SyncThing,
| Jami, and Dat between them probably have 100% of the technology
| needed to make it work.
|
| Possible solutions for a semi-decentralized model preserving some
| of the advantages of decentralized:
|
| * Private Key based identity, no unique human-meaningful names at
| the protocol level. Just use some other platform to actually find
| your friends instead of trying to replace the whole internet.
|
| * Your data is on your device, and on any server you are
| registered with and set up sync with. They can be free or paid,
| not the.protocols problem.
|
| * Actually finding where to look for your friends stuff is not
| the protocols problem. You have LAN discovery, you can manually
| enter a server, and the clients know to try the common servers.
| Add whatever name servers or DHT extensions you want to that.
|
| * Discussion threads could just be best-effort sync. Maybe you
| don't see every message if the network was partitioned but you
| probably will eventually.
|
| * Threads could be "Hosted" at all servers that a user who made
| them is registered with.
|
| * Messages contain lists of what other servers you are registered
| at, and you get a certificate from all of them proving it.
|
| * That means the client can always find your other stuff
| somewhere else even if one server goes down.
|
| * You can always choose to mirror a thread on all your own
| devices and servers for archival, and make it visible on your
| profile, it stays in sync, or you can freeze it so it doesn't, or
| you can copy it to a brand new thread.
|
| * Posts are editable and deletable.
|
| * Tombstone problem solution: Content is truly gone if you know
| the full list of servers a user is synced with, all those servers
| are up to date with their device, and none of them have it.
|
| * You can make a thread that requires membership at a specific
| server to post at, for spam restrictions.
|
| * There are no categories. You just share your thread to other
| threads.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259930#36261641 for my
| suggestion (forum aggregator where you can view and post on
| arbitrary sites via arbitrary APIs)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yes. But you have to do it in the way that Usenet was built and
| you may not like that.
|
| I was intelca!cem on Usenet. Modem charges (phone calls) weren't
| free outside the local calling zone, and places like Berkeley
| (ucbvax) were often "hubs" that could use university resources to
| move data over longer distances. Every node had _all_ the data,
| so system administrators had to come up with schemes for what to
| delete and when. Even though it was "open" people regularly
| railed against "the cabal" which where the folks who essentially
| controlled the namespace so you want a new
| comp.sys.<architecture> newsgroup, the cabal had to sign off on
| that or the other nodes wouldn't accept your postings to it. That
| fight spawned the "alt" tree and it allowed for an affirmative
| choice of "constrained" posts or "freeforall" posts. The "risky"
| groups distributed binaries, some of which were CSAM and some of
| which were pirated software. This lead to a lot of nodes not
| carrying them (easier than filtering out the bad stuff). For
| history, "pathing" was something like sun!ucbvax!intelca!cem
| which meant Sun sent things to ucbvax, and ucbvax would forward
| things to intelca. So if ucbvax decides not to "carry" a
| newsgroup, then no one down stream from them would get those
| newsgroups. (this lead to ISPs advertising "full" Usenet feeds in
| the 90's)
|
| So what would a "modern" Usenet look like? Consider; Things that
| were expensive then (long distance and storage) are cheap now and
| things that were cheap then (class C subnets) but are expensive
| now. Usenet was hosted on netnews which was described by the
| netnew transport protocol or nntp. Just like the web is hosted on
| the hyper text transport protocol http. First and foremost a
| modern Usenet needs a modern foundational transport protocol.
| This would be IPV6 based (lots of available addresses) and end to
| end encrypted. You could implement this with carrier grade NAT or
| you could use tailscale. The latter is "easy" and a proof of
| concept would be easy to slap together. I think of this as
| engineering deliverable #1, a protocol for peer to peer newsgroup
| sharing with IPV6 addresses and end to end encryption.
|
| From a cost perspective, that needs to be born by the user.
| Fortunately people already pay for their Internet access and
| computer(s), so really it just requires dedicating a computer to
| be your "node" in the hierarchy.
|
| This gives us engineering deliverable #2, a repository of name to
| address mappings. While this could easily be provided by a
| bespoke DNS with its own set or root servers. The limitation and
| risk of third party DNS servers is well known. In 1990 I designed
| a system for NIS+ which allowed clients to start from zero trust
| and an introduction to a "server" they could trust, to allow for
| elaborating trust across a much larger network. It was
| implemented by a brilliant engineer (a guy name Kamal Anand) who
| created a cache service for keeping a credential cache of trusted
| servers. The advantage of such a system is that "who you trust"
| is something you get to decide, and you can decide not to trust
| servers that others trust or to trust servers that others don't.
|
| Engineering deliverable #3 would be a core "server" which
| exchanges information with other servers it trusts, posts that it
| has seen that others have not, and presenting posts it receives
| to others once it receives them. It has functions to list posts,
| and to work with a client to change visibility rules (read/unread
| subscribed/unsubscribed etc). I will admit that one of the areas
| where looking at how gmail was implemented most impressed me was
| the idea that messages were the "general ledger" and folders,
| state, Etc. were just labels on the transactions. This works
| really well because delivery can be one linear write to a single
| blob, with individual "messages" and their attachements by
| addressable content into that blob. So the indexes stay small,
| the messages could be written to write-once optical media if you
| wanted.
|
| Engineering deliverable #4 is a client, that authenticates to
| "your" server from any connection point on the Internet (remember
| I said tailscale makes this super easy), that runs on any of your
| devices (phone, tablet, laptop), and allows you to interact with
| the service; list, read, write, delete, classify posts.
|
| I believe the key to financial success here is that the only
| "cost" to host this service is equivalent to running a dozen DNS
| server instances. All the hardware, storage, and connectivity
| costs are born by the client through systems they already pay
| for. As a client you could choose to trust a mapping server or
| maybe trust the server your friend is using with a choice to
| trust whomever that server trusts.
|
| Finally, you would have to accept that in all likelyhood you and
| your buddies would be the only "cool kids" on this service for
| the first couple of years of its existence. Lots of muscle memory
| out there for existing sites (reddit et alia) and so a lot of "oh
| I read that on neuvoUsenet you probably didn't see it"
| experiences. Investing in outreach to specific groups would
| benefit things greatly.
|
| The bottom line is that I consider this both a good idea and
| technically doable but it is a labor of love at present, it is by
| design difficult to monetize.
| zilti wrote:
| So basically you want the clients to store their data
| themselves? I actually thought about such a thing as well, but
| that would have severe performance implications, or require a
| DHT-like storage where stuff gets chopped up and replicated on
| a bunch of other clients, meaning those other clients would not
| only have to offer extra storage, but also experience a lot of
| bandwidth usage.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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!
| ilyt wrote:
| 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.
| floren wrote:
| 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.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| 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
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