On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 21:16:23 +0000 (UTC)
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
> In comp.misc, Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think private hierarchies is the most promising way forward , people running their
> > own newsservers and having groups on those servers where they make the rules.
>
> If it's locked to a particular news server, might as well be a web
> forum.

I'm not sure what you mean by locked. The news server would be willing to
peer. But it may be that the content is so specialised (like the
fishing.somewhere example I gave) that no other server would be interested
in peering with them. Regardless , I think that usenet has many technical
advantages over a web forum. But it depends on the forum , I'm sure there's
more software than I've seen.

> > So I'm envisioning a large number of privately run newsservers where each
> > operator makes their own rules.
>
> Sounds like a discoverability nightmare.

There's no discoverability nightmare , either someone has not heard it at all
in which case there's no "nightmare" or they have heard it in which case they
have discovered it.

> > This way people can experiment with different schemes on different
> > servers and experience can develop on what works best. For example
> > some groups may only support encrypted posts and only people who know
> > the key would be able to read.
>
> How do you propose enforcing anti-leaking rules? Anything that's only
> available encrypted clearly has implicit anti-leaking rules, but there's
> nothing stopping someone from mirroring the content in plaintext.

It can't be absolutely enforced , any shared secret can be leaked by one of
those who share it.

[...]

> I run a private Discourse (discourse.org) web forum. It's got zero
> search engine visibility (robots.txt disallows "/" AND posts cannot be
> read with out a login; I do not restrict account creation in any way
> however.) It works well for spam-free and low drama discussion. I do it
> with a 100% free VPC.

www.discourse.org/about :
Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the
minimum browser requirements are high.

Discourse supports the latest, stable releases of all major browsers
and platforms:

* Microsoft Edge
* Google Chrome
* Mozilla Firefox
* Apple Safari

So in order to read the discussions you need bloated software *and* it's only
for 10 years ? The content of a public discussion should ideally be available
for thousands of years , not 10 years.

https://www.discourse.org/features :

Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have
to constantly find the Next Page button? We've replaced all that with the
power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Keep scrolling down.

I agree that pages are annoying. That's why when I'm really interested in a
usenet thread I save the whole of it as a single file , one post after the
other in chronological order (of course , some people prefer a threaded
presentation). How easy is it to do this with Discourse ? Can you search the
whole discussion for a regular expression ? Can you put marks on the page
like you can with vim ?

https://www.discourse.org/features :

Links automatically expand

Want to share a cool link you found? Just paste it in on a single line
and we'll make it awesome. Links to Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, GitHub,
Twitter, Flickr, and hundreds of other popular websites automatically
expand to provide additional context and information.

So you actually like this ?

https://www.discourse.org/features :

Summarize topics

Use the Summarize button to condense long topics to just the most
interesting and popular posts.

Is there also a "think for yourself" button or they don't provide this feature
yet ?

> https://meta.discourse.org/t/self-hosting-for-free-with-oracle-cloud/139184/

What happens if Oracle stop providing the service ? How easy would it be for
you to migrate all the content ? Would your users have to use a different URL
for the new hosting ?

> > Another idea is someone running their own sever and one of the groups
> > would be their personal blog instead of relying on one of the
> > established platforms for blogging.
>
> I don't think the world lacks for alternatives to the "established
> platforms for blogging."

For example ?

Another application for running one's own news server is for discussion for
some open source project instead of using mailing lists. Assuming the server
retains everything which has been posted , there won't be a need for a
separate archives facility. Also , one could read the new content without
subscribing.

--
Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. "Armageddon" is cut together like
its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you'd have a TV ad.
www.rogerebert.com/reviews/armageddon-1998

In comp.misc, Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 21:16:23 +0000 (UTC)
> Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
>> In comp.misc, Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think private hierarchies is the most promising way forward,
>>> people running their own newsservers and having groups on those
>>> servers where they make the rules.
>> If it's locked to a particular news server, might as well be a web
>> forum.
> I'm not sure what you mean by locked. The news server would be willing to
> peer.

You want to create your own rules AND peer? Good luck with that.

>> Sounds like a discoverability nightmare.
> There's no discoverability nightmare , either someone has not heard it
> at all in which case there's no "nightmare" or they have heard it in

That is exactly the nightmare. If the people who want it haven't heard
of it and can't find it, it might as well not exist.

>> I run a private Discourse (discourse.org) web forum. It's got zero
>> search engine visibility (robots.txt disallows "/" AND posts cannot be
>> read with out a login; I do not restrict account creation in any way
>> however.) It works well for spam-free and low drama discussion. I do it
>> with a 100% free VPC.
> www.discourse.org/about :
> Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the
> minimum browser requirements are high.

By "next 10 years" they mean they are forward thinking, not backward,
and that it why they do not support older browsers. There are tradeoffs
with everything, and Discourse is up-front about them. I do prefer that
my websites work in Lynx, which Discourse does not, but I tolerate it.

> So in order to read the discussions you need bloated software *and* it's only
> for 10 years ? The content of a public discussion should ideally be available
> for thousands of years , not 10 years.

It's 100% free and open source. I could choose to support it longer if I
wish (and if they stop). I don't expect NNTP to last for "thousands of
years", why should I expect a web forum to?

> I agree that pages are annoying. That's why when I'm really interested in a
> usenet thread I save the whole of it as a single file , one post after the
> other in chronological order (of course , some people prefer a threaded
> presentation). How easy is it to do this with Discourse ? Can you search the
> whole discussion for a regular expression ? Can you put marks on the page
> like you can with vim ?

You can join a Discourse forum and try the experience for yourself. You
can search, but it's postgres text search, not regexp. You can download
all of your own posts in CSV format, but you can't download other
people's like that. So saving a full topic is difficult. There is a
non-JS paged view that web crawlers (eg Wayback Machine) can use. You
can create (within Discourse) bookmarks to individual posts, and the
bookmarks have an option to remind you about your bookmark. This works
well for say "I'm going to do this next week and I'll followup after
that" type reminders.

> https://www.discourse.org/features :
>
> Links automatically expand
>
> Want to share a cool link you found? Just paste it in on a single
> line and we'll make it awesome. Links to Wikipedia, YouTube,
> Amazon, GitHub, Twitter, Flickr, and hundreds of other popular
> websites automatically expand to provide additional context and
> information.
>
> So you actually like this ?

This is a feature.

What's behind this link?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=547qBcSwmyQ

When it expands to include a cover image and the video title, you know
without having to visit it first.

> https://www.discourse.org/features :
>
> Summarize topics
>
> Use the Summarize button to condense long topics to just the most
> interesting and popular posts.
>
> Is there also a "think for yourself" button or they don't provide this
> feature yet ?

You don't want the summary? Read the topic. That's how it works.

>> https://meta.discourse.org/t/self-hosting-for-free-with-oracle-cloud/139184/
> What happens if Oracle stop providing the service ? How easy would it
> be for you to migrate all the content ? Would your users have to use a
> different URL for the new hosting ?

I have daily backups to a server that's not in Oracle. (I pay for that
server, but I was paying for it before starting the Discourse site and
I have enough disk that I'm not paying extra to hold the backups. Five
days of complete backup are using 10G of space.)

If the Oracle server goes away, I can spend money to spin up a VPC
elsewhere and restore from backup. Not hard. Oracle doesn't own the
domain name, so Oracle doesn't get to own the URL.

>>> Another idea is someone running their own sever and one of the groups
>>> would be their personal blog instead of relying on one of the
>>> established platforms for blogging.
>> I don't think the world lacks for alternatives to the "established
>> platforms for blogging."
> For example ?

Don't like blogging on Wix / Wordpress / Blogger / Weebly / Tumblr?
Well, have you considered Medium / Substack / Dreamwidth / Reddit /
Plume? (Or even self-hosted?) There are 87 pages in Wikipedia
Category:Blog_hosting_services, self-hosting adds many more options.

> Another application for running one's own news server is for
> discussion for some open source project instead of using mailing
> lists. Assuming the server retains everything which has been posted ,
> there won't be a need for a separate archives facility. Also , one
> could read the new content without subscribing.

You still need to implement a search, or it will be unweildy. You need
to implement off-site backups, or it's a single point of failure. You
need come up with an account system and/or moderation to deal with
issues.

But sure, you _could_ do that. Got any examples of a project that does?

Elijah
------
uses privately hosted search engines for two private netnews heirarchies

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
> In comp.misc, Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I don't think the world lacks for alternatives to the "established
>>> platforms for blogging."
>> For example ?
>
> Don't like blogging on Wix / Wordpress / Blogger / Weebly / Tumblr?
> Well, have you considered Medium / Substack / Dreamwidth / Reddit /
> Plume? (Or even self-hosted?) There are 87 pages in Wikipedia
> Category:Blog_hosting_services, self-hosting adds many more options.

If you get an RSS feed for your blog, you can also subscribe it
to gwene.org so that it's readable via NNTP.

>> Another application for running one's own news server is for
>> discussion for some open source project instead of using mailing
>> lists. Assuming the server retains everything which has been posted ,
>> there won't be a need for a separate archives facility. Also , one
>> could read the new content without subscribing.
>
> You still need to implement a search, or it will be unweildy. You need
> to implement off-site backups, or it's a single point of failure. You
> need come up with an account system and/or moderation to deal with
> issues.
>
> But sure, you _could_ do that. Got any examples of a project that does?

Mozilla were hardly the only ones running their own news servers
for software projects:
http://web.archive.org/web/20200129063533/http://www.nyx.net/~bkraft/

Checking a few of them: news.dbase.com, nntp.perl.org,
news.php.net, news.povray.org, news.tin.org, are some that still
live. Most are tied into mailing lists and probably have a web
interface somewhere (though maybe read-only and without search).

Also there's Gmane (now at gmane.io) for accessing mailing lists
via NNTP.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:

> You need
> to implement off-site backups, or it's a single point of failure.

In Usenet? I'm pretty sure it's already implemented.

not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) writes:

> Checking a few of them: news.dbase.com, nntp.perl.org,
> news.php.net, news.povray.org, news.tin.org, are some that still
> live. Most are tied into mailing lists and probably have a web
> interface somewhere (though maybe read-only and without search).
>
> Also there's Gmane (now at gmane.io) for accessing mailing lists
> via NNTP.

There's also public-inbox (https://public-inbox.org/) which makes it
possible to publish list archives to NNTP, IMAP, WWW, etc.

The web forum for the D language, https://forum.dlang.org, is backed by
an NNTP server at news.digitalmars.com. The software they use is
<https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed>.

I love gmane, but it is a single point of failure.

-- Chris