@lkh as I said, the idea is simple, getting it working isn't. there are a lot of small working parts that need to be configured right.
like the passwd file needs to have a tab between username and password, where everywhere else a space is enough.
and of course the documentation is spread over at least 20 year old files all over the net.
it's not like many people are enthusiastic about this particular technology (because lets face it, for #usenet#nntp is superior, for email it's #smtp)
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.
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.
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.
I can't figure how to set up the username and password of my account for the NNTP server and the passowrd of my email account for the outgoing SMTP server. It's not clear whether it's even possible.
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.
For those of us of a certain age (who typically now have a lot of gray in our hair🤣) who were online before the #Internet connected everything, #USENET was one of the original places where we posted in forums, engaged in debates (and the occasional flame war), learned a lot, spent way too much time, and yes, sometimes dealt with abusive and toxic behavior. USENET never really went away, and some are trying to bring it back…
I tried using Email but the onboarding was very confusing. I have to choose a server? And I'm at the whims of server admins having petty disputes for if my posts are delivered to my friends?
"'The threadiverse', aka #fediverse group servers like #guppe, #lemmy and #kbin are all based on the premise that each community is hosted on one instance, but users and posts can come from all over. So it's like any normal #phpBB-style forum, except you use your own user instead of having to register and check everywhere.
Makes sense to me, and I'm not saying that they should do it any other way, but this is exactly how mailing lists work."
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. 😎
@alex@daviwil
There is nothing more satisfying
than working for hours (read: weeks) on that single all-covering config and deploying it with one click.
Also no shepherd sounded nice, but i didnt make the switch to guix from nix yet.
I've been all out of steam for much in the way of side projects lately. But, this whole Reddit-splosion thing - and the enshittification of Google search results - really makes me want to finally find time to build some sort of federated link sharing thing that leans into socially-networked search. Like less emphasis on the discussion forum aspect and more on the discovery of good stuff via real humans aspect.
@randomgeek@lmorchard@genehack I remember back about 15 years ago I wrote a hacky #RSS to #NNTP daemon so I could read my #blog subscriptions in Microsoft #Entourage. (Entourage was a terrible newsreader, but RSS is unicast and not threaded so it didn’t matter.)
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with […]
@Edent Gah I miss the uni days and in particular our local ukc.misc group! We had “MiscMeets” and all sorts of fables and friendships came of that! #ukc#ukcmisc#newsnet#nntp
Ich empfinde das (Ver-)Folgen von Personen als total falsches Konzept. Kaum hatte ich die ersten Personen in meiner #Gestalktenliste, wurde mir klar, daß ich wirklich nicht jede Äußerung von diesen sehen will.
Wir sollten stattdessen #Themen folgen können. Die #Tagmoral ist aber zu niedrig und mir wurde erklärt, daß obendrein das #tagbasierte Propagieren zwischen den Instanzen funktionieren kann, aber nicht muß. Ich hab's mangels Ahnung von Mastodon-Server-Internas nicht richtig verstanden.
Soziale Netze scheinen überwiegend zum Followers-, Likes- und Boosts-Zählen zu existieren? Für mich funktioniert das SO nicht.
Die hiesige (emacs.ch) lokale Timeline ist zum Glück recht ergiebig zu einem gewissen Thema, was mich auf die Idee bringt, daß generell eine Instanz pro Thema her müsste, sozusagen die Wiederentdeckung von #Newsgroups mit anderen Mitteln!
Zum Glück hat das #Usenet einen langen Atem und zwar #NNTP-inkompatible, aber gut fokussierte Foren sind durch soziale Netze auch nicht verschwunden.
This #Mastodon / #email bridge <https://tacobelllabs.net/@nkizz/110340426573847934> by @nkizz is just brilliant, but you know what would absolutely ROCK? A #Fediverse server that had native support for #IMAP.
While we're on the topic, I wonder if anybody has thought about building a client with an UX inspired by Usenet newsreaders (personally, MicroPlanet Gravity was one of the few things I missed from Windows when I switched to Linux, would love to see something like that for Mastodon.)
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.