[kkfx]

> Killfiles and Scorefiles

That's one of the most important thing most people ignore: they means we can have our PERSONAL aggregator instead of using someone else algorithms and censorship. Sure at usenet time (or back at Xerox time where these concept was implemented for the first time in known history) the level of scoring and self-censoring technique was limited but nowadays it's a CENTRAL point. Usenet is a decentralized network no one own, no one can really censor at a whole and aggregators who are needed for anything high volumes are personal things, posts can be archived locally so they do not disappear and so on.

Coupled and integrated (like Gnus offer) with RSS feeds mails and in the case of Gnus also HN (nnhackernews backend) or Reddit (nnreddit) we can have a CONSISTENT and LOCAL UIs for ALL our public information/communication infra in a robust yet simple manner. That's the classic nuclear war resilient internet vs the modern centralized and censored web.

Oh BTW usenet today it's almost abandoned, but some have rediscovered it for mostly piracy as an alternative to bittorrent. It's relevant because it means that while normally binary groups in a modern world are a bit odd they perform well enough for such big file sharing usage.

Or, long story short: evolving these tools we can have a modern classic desktop who happen to be a human PERSONAL exobrain, work desk, tool, with the human at the center. With the modern web and relevant WebVMs we get instead modern dumb terminals of modern mainframes.

Do you prefer owning nothing "and being happy" like the infamous WEF/2030 video OR you prefer own your small slice of the world peer between peers?

[donut]

> have our PERSONAL aggregator

That's the dream, isn't it.

So if there are 100 people whose messages you willingly watch, how do you discover new people? (Maybe you do so organically when they mention them?)

And if you _do_ allow yourself to taste from the firehose of unfiltered messages, a single personal list of users/messages wouldn't scale and you have the classic spam problem. Do you share your rules with others (and form an aggregation like https://www.dnsbl.info/)?

Curious what you think about https://atproto.com/:

  Algorithmic choice
  
  Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.

[kkfx]

I answer indirectly: you probably know that most "manual tagging" is hyper-efficient compared to automatic one, and you probably here polemics about YT, Meta etc algorithms who push people toward extreme positions, apparently in neutral manners like yes, some video push toward political extreme right or left, but also some young girl video push toward younger and younger and so on..

So how to discover people? Well, in Usenet that happen at a slow but effective peace: you start to choose some groups you think to be interested in, the total number of groups is not that high and names are sufficient for a mere full-text search in a hierarchy. You start participate and others members write about some other groups "you might ask there", "try here" etc. In modern terms this is Reddit subs with a bit more discoverability and less abandoned groups. Since Reddit today seems to be effective enough that skilled people add "reddit" to most google search queries to find better contents...

Then the spam problem: at Usenet eternal september time antispam was limited, nowadays simple filters suffice AND we can import another piece of neglected IT evolution: the concept of PGP/GNUPG with their chain of trust. Or some will keep rotating usernames, some will keep them for decades. Those can share public keys signing each others in a classic chain-of-trust exchanging spam data automatically from their own client. Such approach is limited, but it's still better than actual "lists" for instance. It's still a cohort of people who decide BUT such cohort is not a for-profit company.

Long-story short even with current progresses expert systems are FAR to be near the human selection quality and actually it's possible to get partitioned human selection shared spontaneously to others. This is probably slower in discovering new stuff but bring most high quality results and avoid certain derives, so in the end is better. Actual volumes of posts often named "infodemia" needs to slow down and going up in quality. Eternal september do not show the limit of Usenet but the limit of a certain tech, we can plug-in more to surpass them and keep evolving instead of keeping reinventing the wheel with company-startup-alike experiments who keep duplicating similar concept just varying a little bit.

Competitive means from Oracle/CIA "different teams one against/semi-isolated to the others" produce some results, but a classic endless evolution of Lisp/Smalltalk systems the history prove produce MUCH better evolution because do not stop diversity, but allow diversity to merge and emerge. ALL "recent" IT evolution prove that countless times. ALL "recent" scientific trends do the same.