[PaulRobinson]

I've thought about this a few times over the years, and the protocol is broken in ways that lead to poor UX - the whole thing became over-ran with crap. I do think it's possible to fix this with better client software, but nobody wanted to do that work, because everyone interested in building communities could make a lot more money taking VC funding and creating it in a walled garden that's now getting ID verification walls around it.

[tracker1]

Yeah... I mean, you don't have to implement everything to be useful as a message platform though... most of the extension usage are kludges anyway. Also, can probably simply use UTF8 and UTC/GMT by convention where the client displays local date/time, etc. Can also revamp a lot of aspects by convention in-network as part of the server/client structures.

That said, I'd still say it's useful, you just need to at least have user/system authentication as plain text over nntp(s|es) to significantly reduce spam.