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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?
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* It was discoverable. Part of this was that although it was large, the group-space was functionally finite. Part of this was that there was some amount of hierarchy. Part of this was being able to follow interesting people to other groups (although I have no memory of how I did that). The result was that I was able to find several great communities about topics that I was interested in, and they were "the" community for that interest.
* The information-transmission system and the UI client were entirely separate. That led to a proliferation of UI clients that met different people's needs. You already mentioned that, but I think one of the critical pieces is that it allowed a lot of programmers to experiment with what made the system work for them, which made for far more innovation than would have happened with a centralized owner of "the UI".
* Local groups were supported using the same system as global groups.
* Although conversations were threaded, there was no assumption that the reader was able to immediately reference the previous message in the thread, and this evolutionary pressure led to a bottom-posting writing style where one explicitly quoted the text that one was replying to before writing the reply.
* More-generally, the time delay in posts was an evolutionary pressure that led to longer-form writing rather than single-sentence replies. This was also supported by the fact that it was possible to reply at any point in the thread -- there was minimal evolutionary pressure to respond quickly before the conversation moved on.
* Notification-wise, replies to threads were equal to "top-level" posts that created new threads. This avoids the problem that Dreamwidth often has, where if a conversation shows up under a week-old post, nobody who's not in the conversation will see it. More generally, although conversations were tree-threaded, the typical reading style was to just read the new posts from the last day, and Usenet readers made this reading style very easy to do. (This feels very rare among threaded forums.)
* Several of the newsgroups I was in died not because of the Inevitable Death of Usenet, but because of specific people who dominated conversations with their personal ideology. They weren't "toxic" in the obvious sense; they were simply deeply committed to an ideology that was at odds with other posters and also capable of writing large volumes of posts, and the result was that conversations in the group became more and more dominated by debating their ideology. All of this was nominally on-topic, and the "death" of the group wasn't visible in a decline in posts, but thoughtful discussion of any other topic got derailed enough that people stopped writing it.
* Groups typically had clear and relatively-easily-findable charters of what was considered on-topic and off-topic. Also, the lack of easy access to back archives meant that well-curated FAQs were common.
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If you haven't read it, I commend this article on "toxic influencers". It's not quite specifically talking about the same effect you are, but I think there's some overlap in terms of the personalities involved.
no subject
One of the ways that I would do that was by examining the headers for cross-posted messages. You could see whatever other groups were posted to.