Thoughts about Nusenet

[jducoeur]

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.)

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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.)

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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?

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+ 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.

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- 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.

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+ 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.)

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+ 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.)

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+ 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.)

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? 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.)

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- 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.)

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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?

Comments

[keshwyn]

Legal: What do you do when illegal (and I'm thinking CSAM) content gets posted to a group? How does it get deleted? How do you handle the fact that since it's a distributed thing, that crap is now on *everyone's* machine?

[brooksmoses]

That is an excellent question, yes. I presume the way Usenet servers handled the alt.binaries.* groups was a combination of delete messages and Section 230 legal protection for ISPs, but deleted messages aren't reliable and Section 230 didn't exist until 1996, so I presume that wasn't really a solved problem.

I would say there's a fair bit of value in the way the rest of Usenet addressed this, which was to not carry anything other than plaintext content, which at least limits the scope of illegal material although it doesn't eliminate it. Even if a distributed system supports images/video/etc., it would probably help substantially to only replicate the image content across servers, and have clients load the images directly from the server they were posted to.