[iisan7]

Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again. With buzz about moving to Mastodon, I was just thinking about why usenet couldn't be a viable social media platform as it represents so much of what people like about the fediverse, and then some. It would be fascinating to see the usenet protocol repurposed and new clients and newsgroups built upon lessons from the past decade.

[floren]

It's pretty easy to set up your own INN2 servers and have them exchange their own hierarchy. However it also feels like there's just a ton of features and options in there which mostly make it very challenging to set up the simple case (and leave you feeling like you've left holes open). I've never really dug into the NNTP spec but it seems like it might be pretty easy to write your own implementation which just focuses on the common use-case.

[donut]

> Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again.

Right? It was such a good time :-) You're welcome.

> why usenet couldn't be a viable social media platform

I wonder if identity plays a role here. Centralizing points (likes, retweets, etc) drives people to work on getting attention with their posts, to drive engagement, but also invites troublemakers and controversy.

[8bitsrule]

Coincidentally, me too! Getting rid of exchanging binaries would keep traffic quantity much more reasonable (and civilized). Federation lets everyone see all the messages (no signing up-for). Named-topic forums is much better than searching for tags. (TIL also that Thunderbird has News built-in!)