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Thoughts about Nusenet
For a while now, I've been pondering the idea of, "What would / should Usenet look like if we were to rebuild it today?" As Reddit tries to go full Twitter, that topic is getting a little more timely.
So let's take the question seriously, and kick it off with some initial requirements analysis.
(I'm going to post this on both Mastodon and Dreamwidth; comments solicited on both.)
Personal context: Usenet was basically my introduction to the Internet, back in '87: I was one of the founding members of the Rialto, the SCA newsgroup (rec.org.sca), and pretty much lived on Usenet for about five years.
I've been contemplating this "what would a new Usenet be?" for a fairly long time. (I actually own nusenet.org, specifically to provide a home domain if this ever goes anywhere.)
For those going, "WTF is Usenet?", it was the original distributed forum system. Conversations on hundreds of topics, copied from server to server around the world. The tech was primitive by today's standards, but it was fairly cutting-edge then.
So let's think about requirements from a Usenet lens. What did it do well? (+) What were its problems? (-) What were we not even thinking about then?
+ Usenet was topic oriented, not person oriented. That's an important niche, and surprisingly poorly served nowadays.
+ "Topics" could include communities. Some of my favorite newsgroups were for particular niche communities (like the SCA).
+ The topic namespace was hierarchical; you could easily split rec.humor.funny out of rec.humor.
- The Usenet namespace (the list of groups) was controlled by centralized mechanisms that scaled fairly poorly. This worked for hundreds of topics; it wouldn't work for tens of thousands.
(The community quickly devised a workaround, in the form of unofficial "alt" newsgroups for topics that were too new or controversial. These weren't necessarily distributed as widely, but it generally worked.)
IMO, folks should be able to devise whatever groups they want: it shouldn't be centralized.
+ Other than the namespace, the system was highly distributed. Not only wasn't it centrally controlled, it was architecturally almost impossible to control.
(This didn't seem radical at the time, since the other major system was email. Now, it seems kind of radical.)
+ Conversations were explicitly threaded, and threads could branch as needed. No, this isn't obvious, and there are both pros and cons to it.
+ It was defined by the protocol, not by the specific client: more like email, less like Facebook. (Again, this isn't obvious, especially nowadays.)
+ You could block individual posters. For the time, that was a bit radical.
- I suspect the moderation tools weren't nearly good enough for modern requirements, although they were evolving pretty rapidly.
? I'm not entirely sure what moderation means for this sort of medium. Getting this right is important, and not simple. (This is a big topic.)
? While you could avoid reading the messages from a toxic poster, there was no way to prevent a toxic poster from seeing you.
(This was a concept that just plain didn't exist, and still doesn't exist in many systems. But a lot of folks in the Fediverse care about it, so it's worth mentioning and thinking about.)
- Spam was (and is) a problem. Usenet was where we really learned how much of a problem spam could be.
(Yes, this ties into the moderation problem, but is a different problem than bad behavior or toxicity, and probably needs to be looked at separately.)
Okay, that's an initial list, to start the conversation. What have I missed? Do I have some of the plusses and minuses wrong?
For now, let's focus on requirements rather than architecture -- "what do we want?" rather than "how should it be built?" (Or "does this already exist?") Those can come later.
Thoughts?
no subject
I feel like there are a lot of things that are just -standard- these days that would be included automatically just by current convention. Formatted text, mobile interface, embedded media, a11y.
I feel like Discord has a decent basic identity approach: you have an account, but that account can use different nicknames across your different group forums. You can even have multiple accounts to isolate things further. But true anonymity is hard.
no subject
Largely agreed, although I'm conscious of the fact that folks seem to survive without most of these. For example, search is problematic in Mastodon architecturally, even beside the folks who simply don't want it to exist. I think these are all desirable, but I'm trying not to firmly assume them.
(a11y is a little more important than the rest, IMO, but I think is more about the clients than the protocols.)
I'm very conscious of this topic, given how much effort I put into Querki's three-level identity-management system. (Which is pretty much the state of the art under the hood, even though it's never been fully realized in the UI.)
That said, part of me would prefer for identity to be entirely outside the scope of Nusenet per se -- that it should be a consumer of a well-designed identity architecture, not a provider of one.
But the nickname point is a good one (and similar to Querki's concept of "Person"): it's sometimes helpful for the same public Identity to be customized per-community. (Separately from the ability of a single private User to have multiple public Identities.)
As for anonymity, I think folks have done a good job of hashing through most of the points above. Personally, I don't think anonymous posting should be possible -- the history of the Internet suggests that that's a recipe for disaster, although we might want to carve out a niche for opting in to anonymous posting on the small scale (specific posts for a limited time window) for specialized requirements. Anonymous reading is a very different question, and not at all obvious to me: there are arguments both ways, and it could be a per-topic setting.
It's a complex and important topic, and I'm not sure which bits should be part of Nusenet per se, and which belong more properly in a different part of the system.
no subject
This might actually resolve the disagreements about anonymity, assuming the existence of a robust anonymous identity server. Though maintaining such a thing is non-trivial, as witness the demise of the one that I'm familiar with from the original Usenet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
the history of the Internet suggests that that's a recipe for disaster
Counterpoint: https://i.redd.it/bfk8au96slxa1.png
no subject
Fair, but the failure mode of anonymity is less "asshole" and more "endless stream of abuse". It's extraordinarily difficult to manage the levels of abuse that are possible with full anonymity, since it becomes fairly easy to essentially flood the zone. An identity -- even a pseudonymous one -- can be managed in organized ways. But true anonymity is sort of an undifferentiated mass, which is much more challenging.
If it was possible to build reliable automated tools to deal with that sort of thing, I might change my mind, but that's getting into essentially "trustworthy AI", and I think we're a fair ways from that being a valid phrase.
Basically, it's a management problem. So when I talk about carving out niches for anonymity in limited ways, I'm thinking along the lines of allowing anonymous posting in one's own DW -- an individual is taking responsibility for managing the consequences, and there is a way to cut it off when the bots discover it and start attacking in earnest.
no subject
With that said, I'm not really clear what you mean by a "anonymous identity server", since to me "anonymous identity" seems self-contradictory. The problems with the Penet remailer seem to have been that it attempted to provide opaque pseudonymity, in which a poster had a persistent identifier (which then was information that needed to be securely stored) -- and, in fact, Wikipedia describes it as a "pseudonymous remailer", not an anonymous one.
I understand "anonymity" in this context to mean "there is no way to tie this message to anything else the poster may have posted or to any private communications medium"; the technical problems are only ones of securely deleting information. By contrast, "pseudonymity" in my understanding is the situation where there is a name, and we as outsiders know that the name connects several things (perhaps multiple posts, perhaps a post and a maildrop, perhaps some other things) that are associated with that name, but we don't know anything that would allow us to know which person is responsible for this set of connected things.
This is relevant because I don't think there is any significant disagreement about the value of pseudonymity, so long as the pseudonymity cannot generally be used as a means to achieve anonymity (i.e., by allowing a single person to obtain an essentially inexhaustible supply of pseudonyms at negligible cost). The experience on Usenet -- and here on Dreamwidth -- has been pretty strongly in favor of the proposition that pseudonymity is a positive feature.
no subject
I am also mindful of the times social media has been used to do things like plan popular uprisings -- or suppress them, when identities were discoverable.
no subject
[1] Nor necessarily false, of course; see e.g. DejaNews.
Are you considering message permanence (unless explicitly deleted) to be a necessary feature of Nusenet, or simply considering that a message should have an immutable canonical link so long as it exists?
no subject
Yes, there is a part of me that is taking the approach of 'treat anything you put on the internet as there forever'. Because that is often more true than not.
no subject
While I'm not certain that it is necessary, I suspect it would prove convenient to define, eg, a URI format, maybe based on the hash of the message content.
That said, I don't think it would make sense to think of that as a "link" per se, since a message probably doesn't have a canonical URL. Given that servers are in practice transient, I'm cautious about how much value that would have. (I don't rule it out, but it might prove more hassle than it is worth.)
no subject
Excellent for threading and searching, not great but not terrible for humans.