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. 😎
The sad state of my quest for a Usenet NNTP GUI client for Linux.
Pan is awesome but the binaries of my Debian Bullseye based distro, Crostini, are ancient and buggy. The Pan project distributes no .deb or other packages. Building from source requires recent versions of tools not in Bullseye.
Very few other GUI options available. Even fewer with .deb or other binaries.
It had its high time approx. 90s to mid 00s. I very much enjoyed it.
It ticks all the boxes when it comes to #federation and freedom of interface: a number of web-based services, CLI tools like #slrn (mine), #Thunderbird and other GUI-tools.
So are #SSB, #NNTP and #ActivityPub the main #social protocols to keep an eye on right now or are others also pretty active and/or with interesting features?
Mostly. I am still trying to get it to work with #usenet, and I still need to get email working.
I'm not sure why I should have a BBS in the first place, but there you go.
It mostly is actually intended as a #nntp server for #ttrpg groups. And it largely works. I can USE it as a server. I just can't pull any new articles from other servers right now, which makes this somewhat less than ideal.
Accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email: https://www.olowe.co/tmp/fedimail.mp4
An experimental #IMAP and #SMTP interface.
I feel like #NNTP#Usenet interface would be more appropriate.
But gotta start somewhere!
Threading and replies work ok too (so far!).
#tomo update for anyone interested in seeing how the sausage is being made with a new decentralized #nntp based better-than #reddit network:
the server software is a fork of Rocksolid-Light
the back-end for connecting to the server and reading/writing posts is 100% nntp protocol compatible.
you can connect to a tomo shard from any newsreader like thunderbird (win/mac/linux), tin, SeaMonkey, NewsTap (iOS) or even classic programs like Forté Agent and Netscape Communicator
posts written on the tomonet.* discussion group hierarchy are shared across all tomo shards.
posts written to private groups on your shard, stay only on your shard.
i'm currently rewriting the front-end so you can do anything from the web interface, without dropping to shell:
create your own discussion groups
delete messages, delete groups
permit/deny access to admin and moderator areas
the big job this week was writing a Roles & Permissions system (RBAC) so group owners, admins and moderators control who can read/post, create/delete groups, and so on.
running a tomo shard is running a #BBS in 2023: as a sysop you are responsible for your users' data, dealing with moderation, and carrying (and not carrying) the kinds of groups your users are into. i'm putting a massive amount of care into providing sysops and mods with the front-end tools for making running a shard enjoyable
With all that #fediverse effervescence, I just rediscovered #irc with #weechat, and realized that #neomutt also support #usenet servers. Going back to the source in a way.
learning that several other decentralized #nntp projects have existed for a few years
reading about the NNTPChan protocol - it uses hashed message id's to produce unique nntp message-id headers across the network. seems like a great idea.
I have complicated feelings regarding #Usenet and #NNTP due to some server-centric aspects.
Granted due to message #gossip the death of any given instance isn't catastrophic and moving is largely unnoticeable, but it still puts some hurdles on usability in adverse conditions.
It still fulfills most of the #AsynchronousCommunication characteristics handily, but that's still a nagging thought, since /most/ instances demand fairly high-uptime to peer and don't allow such instability from peers.
For anyone interested in #LispWorks#CommonLisp, I've just found a full archive of the lispworks-hug mailing list dating back until 2002 to today on the #NNTP server "news.gwene.org". The newsgroup is "gmane.lisp.lispworks.general".
The newsgroup can be easily accessed and searched with this GNUS setup (no auth required):
I wonder if I can just go ahead and make the book fullly available at this point. It earns O'Reilly next to nothing I'm sure, but may be helpful to some who are now building what was once called groupware.
Redoing my #introduction again since it's now been a quarter of a year since I first joined Mastodon:
Hello! 👋 I'm an #autistic Gen Z-er born in the mid-2000s, and I go by the name "Quinn" (with he/him pronouns) on most Internet platforms. I'm a fan of #Indieweb, #SmallWeb, #RSS, #NNTP, and the #Fediverse! 😁
The only two social media platforms I currently use are Mastodon and YouTube. I haven't really dabbled with any other social medias at this point.
Came across this really cool service called Feedbase. It turns your #RSS feeds into #NNTP (Newsgroup) posts that you can comment on! It's definitely grown quite a bit in the last year per the statistics on the website.
Feel free to add your own RSS feeds to your blog or newsletter to the service on the website to help grow the service! It's currently hosting 861 feeds, and serving 5,319,339 articles at the time of this post.
trying out some stuff on the side regarding my #usenet setup. turns out #leafnode doesn't even take more than a second to get all groups from a normal news server. for the #nntp server on my local bbs it is taking the better part of two hours so far, and it's not even finished yet.
I think that's more an issue with the nntp implementation in synchronet though.