while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.
i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.
some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.
best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.
i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎
Been a bit disillusioned with the massive amount of talk about cloning existing big corporate social media, and so little (relative) about trying someone new, or picking up something old to repurpose and modernize.
Plus I like the idea of distributed but less massive. Like a point between central and data flying everywhere.
@breadbin i think there's a really fun opportunity to try out new ideas, while keeping it simple and usable. after checking out lemmy and kbin, i am shocked at how poor the user experience is. mastodon's flaws have only encouraged me to ensure that functions like search work properly.
@cwoodruff i know what you mean. i kinda miss the "usenet that never was" if that makes any sense. reading old usenet posts on google groups was a staunch reminder of how nasty it got
@nazgul@morgan holy crap. this was VERY briefly mentioned in the bbs documentary - definitely a progenitor of the MS-DOS based bbs <-> internet gateways of my childhood
i'd love to see one of these pulling articles from tomo some day!
@vga256@morgan I don't know about Morgan's gateway, but mine was to a local UUCP server, so (on the off chance I was able to find the software) it would still need an NNTP rewrite, but why not! :)
I did just discover there are still people running ProLine! At least there were as of 2021.
@nazgul@morgan there is someone right now working on (modernizing) UUCP support, and I'm hoping to integrate that into tomo down the line. lots of great reasons to make this old tech useful again!
amazing to see someone running proline on what appears to be original hardware. i've still got my //e and //c!
@judell oh absolutely - you can run Windows 95 in any virtual machine software, and install Communicator. it will operate as usual. the only thing for-sure broken are SSL connections, as its root certificate expired 9M years ago
@vga256 this. This is what needs to happen. I often laminate about the old internet and its highly monitored messages boards and discussion groups. Sure, bad stuff slips in. But it was much, much easier to boot out bad actors and bots, thus keeping the whole platform positive and focused. 👍
@Theideaqueen it will be interesting to see what a network of BBSes can do with appropriate moderation tools. being able to peer/unpeer from one another should go a long way towards isolating problem shards
@bersl2 i was so shocked when I found out that more than one person had already thought of it (nntp <-> web forum bridge) and built software to do that.
it's amazing that we can repurpose these old tools 40 years later!
@vga256@bersl2 Turns out that @alex has been busy on this front as well. It's a bit "niche" since it's mostly for role-playing games, but heck, it's also NNTP and his own custom web bridge. https://campaignwiki.org/news
@Pack honestly, the entire idea came from my experiences with #FidoNet back in the 90s. it stuck with me for decades as an incredibly elegant system given the constraints
@tilton 😅 that's one of the moderation bridges we'll have to deal with when we get there. the cabal was useful, but it was also the source of many of usenet's problems - it effectively was centralized control over the hierarchies.
i'm all ears if you (or anyone else) has ideas for making it work. i've always adored #FidoNet for its looser structure and "if it can send and accept bits, it can join the network" approach.
i really miss (what used to be) usenet too. i'm hoping that adding modern moderation and easier peering tools will make it enjoyable.
@tilton yeah! i joined quite a while after you - around 1993 iirc. i find the voting system fascinating. i suspect a solution would be to allow shard-wide votes rather than network-wide votes (which was what usenet relied upon).
i have never liked the “vote to create a group” phenomenon however. whether a shard carries or shares a group would make more sense to me.
@vga256 I'll go on out a limb: while I question centralized media being an inherent problem (even despite bad management in many cases), I'm honestly happy Reddit might be dying. Tried it a little bit for marketing reasons, only to be lucky just to have anything I wrote "downvoted".
@davefischer wow! how cool. INN was practically brand new in that era - i can imagine it wasn't terribly easy to set up. (it took me 3 days just to get inn2 working last week!)
@helle awesome! me too. this bbs software has been maintained and improved by "retro guy" for the last few years as "rocksolid light" but sadly didn't get a ton of traction. i think with some functionality and UI improvements it could make a fantastic forum network.
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