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by wahern
3296 days ago
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NNTP. It was and still is the best solution out there. I guess the reason it never took off was that the backend mindshare and software ecosystem was poor. That is, anybody can and does write specialized web servers and web pages. But if you want to implemented specialized topic group management, you're stuck reimplementing the entire NNTP stack from top to bottom, at which point people would rather just create an ad hoc protocol over HTTP. The downside to doing everything over HTTP is that you're completely proprietary until someone else implements your protocol--but they never will, because like with NNTP it's just easier to create their own standard. NNTP still has fairly rich client support within many modern e-mail clients. |
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Oh, but it did take off. It was the most popular on-line group discussion place twenty years ago. NNTP (or rather Usenet) decline started around the time that web forums popped up in the internets.