| No, NNTP is a TCP protocol. Early USENET moved messages over systems like UUCP. NNTP is to USENET what ActivityPub is Mastadon. USENET is a confederation of cooperating peers, currently using NNTP, but it could be any mechanic to move the messages. You could wire it up using SCP I imagine if you were motivated to do so. Specifically, the NNTP protocol does not talk directly to how USENET works. For example, you can find out how to exchange messages for particular topics using NNTP, but not how to actually create those topics. That left to the actual software and administrators. USENET using the concept of "Control Messages" to exchange information about things like newsgroup status, but the content and format of those messages are not specified in NNTP. As a USENET peer, pretty much all peers are "equal". You host your own news server, you tell it what groups you're interested in, it peers with another host and exchanges messages about those groups. At that level, they're equal. But just because you create a newsgroup on your system, doesn't mean that group is instantly propagated across the planet. That's where the USENET governance kicks in as to who is going peer and distribute new groups, or not. Each individual relationship within the peer group can be different. I can't say exactly how a news client differs from a news server. It may not have any of the peering logic, posting and reading groups directly from a server which then handles the peering. News servers "peer", clients are lighter weight. |