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]

Certainly an external service of that sort seems like a simpler idea than baking anonymous posting into the system. A hypothetical service can receive to-be-posted posts from people and post them under its own identity with whatever filtering and data its programmers desire, and all the Nusenet system cares about is "here is an identity, posting posts, just like any other identity." And, if the filtering and data proves problematic, it's "here is an abusive identity, which we will block." (In fact, it seems to me that prohibiting this sort of anonymous posting would be more difficult than allowing it!)

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.

[alexxkay]

Correct. I meant something much closer to "strong pseudonymity". There were many people on Usenet whose work was a huge benefit, but who were only there because the penet remailer existed.

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.