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

[brooksmoses]

Digging into this a bit more, I think there is a really critical tension between "conversations are generally discoverable" and "you can prevent particular people from seeing your posts". It is really difficult to produce an effective person-level blocklist for content, because fundamentally having a blocklist rather than an allowlist means the "everyone not otherwise specified" set of people is able to see content, and requiring people to have one unique specifier that they can't detach themselves from has a lot of really unfortunate effects.

It's also inevitably permeable, because people share information. Sometimes it's incidental that they're sharing it with the blocked person, as with quoted snippets in a reply, and sometimes it's intentional. Attempting to control that with a blocklist is a fool's errand; if you want something to be secret, don't spread it to almost everyone. (And, IMO, claiming to provide an effective blocklist for otherwise-world-readable content is socially irresponsible.)

A corollary of that, I think, is that delegating access control to servers that you don't trust or control is a bad idea, even if you are allowlisting rather than blocklisting. Use cryptography and access keys, or don't use a federated distribution system for limited-access content.

Interestingly, this sort of access-control system would have been entirely possible to implement on top of Usenet. Instead of putting the sensitive parts of your message in the message body, put a url from which it can be retrieved from an access-gated server. A client could present this entirely transparently, and could even implement message quoting by replacing quotes with urls to message-snippets when crafting reply messages.