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…
> See, because you need an always-on computer in order to really reliably use #decentralized social media
Bruh. #Usenet, #Fidonet and #UUCP (#UUCPnet) beg to differ (no reason you couldn't use #NNCP for Usenet now if #NNTP isn't your thing).
#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
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?
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.
"'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. 😎
We really should consider services that are not #ActivityPub based but still a federated to be part of the #Fediverse and promote them accordingly. Self-hosting is a plus.
#Usenet is also federated and has been since 1979! There are free providers: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/News_service_providers. If one excludes binaries groups, it's possible to peer with other providers via #NNTP. Posts and groups are linkable in HTML.
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?
@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.
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.
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.)