On 2021-10-26, Kévin <usenet.m4o5b@id.oh.mg> wrote:
> It looks like the new usenet group has been set-up. Is there anybody
> else lurking around here ?

I'm here. I was sad to see the list go down, but if it drives people to
usenet then I'm happy!

On 1/5/22 20:20, mbays@sdf.org wrote:
> if it drives people to
> usenet then I'm happy!

You like Usenet???

--
gemini://kwiecien.us/

Ben <benk@tilde.team> wrote:
> On 1/5/22 20:20, mbays@sdf.org wrote:
> > if it drives people to
> > usenet then I'm happy!
>
> You like Usenet???

Well, I think that NNTP is better than mailing lists and web forums,
whether or not it is connected with the rest of Usenet newsgroups.
(In this case it is, which is OK, but I have a NNTP server with some
newsgroups that are not connected with Usenet, for my own projects.)

--
Don't laugh at the moon when it is day time in France.

On 2022-01-05, Ben <benk@tilde.team> wrote:
> On 1/5/22 20:20, mbays@sdf.org wrote:
>> if it drives people to
>> usenet then I'm happy!
>
> You like Usenet???

Modulo spam and the turn-over rate of usable hosts, yes. I have fond
memories of the heydays of rec.arts.int-fiction and
rec.games.roguelike.development .

On 1/5/22 11:11 AM, Ben wrote:
> On 1/5/22 20:20, mbays@sdf.org wrote:
>> if it drives people to
>> usenet then I'm happy!
>
> You like Usenet???

I know the question was not directed at me, but I will chime in anyway.
I find Usenet quite useful.

Usenet is _awesome_ compared to forums, reddit, twitter, etc. The only
thing I like more than Usenet is IRC for quicker answers.

Usenet is censorship-resistant. Hundreds of servers around the world
carry your message when you post it. All political agendas have no power
here. There is no bellicose nanny telling us what to think. Such nannies
have no power to punish us for blasphemy against the party.

Some criminally-minded people hate this. They want to rule over the
conscience of other people. So they hate public Usenet. Well, such
nannies can run their own private NNTP server and practice all the
censorship they want on their own server. Win-win!

By using filters / killfiles on public Usenet, the trolls and spammers
disappear. If you don't like someone's opinion you can just filter them
out instead of trying to murder them for blasphemy against the party.

Some of us are doing anonymous, encrypted comms on
alt.anonymous.messages. Cloak and dagger stuff abounds.

Some organizations and schools still use private Usenet servers for
business purposes. It is convenient and creates a permanent knowledge
base that is searchable and threaded.

If your message gets censored in your country there are still 200 other
countries where it sits for all the world to see.

--
Seven

On 1/5/22 12:16 PM, news@zzo38computer.org.invalid wrote:
> Ben <benk@tilde.team> wrote:
>> On 1/5/22 20:20, mbays@sdf.org wrote:
>>> if it drives people to
>>> usenet then I'm happy!
>>
>> You like Usenet???
>
> Well, I think that NNTP is better than mailing lists and web forums,
> whether or not it is connected with the rest of Usenet newsgroups.
> (In this case it is, which is OK, but I have a NNTP server with some
> newsgroups that are not connected with Usenet, for my own projects.)

Are you interested in sharing any feeds with other private NNTP servers?
I have found a few private NNTPs that I lurk and I'm always looking for
more. My faves are news.tilde.club and news.grc.com. There are others,
especially in fidonet / bbs spaces.

I want to link my own NNTP server to as many of these private ones as
possible, but without any of the big8 or alt or defunct public
heirarchies. Basically only organizational / club / association
hierarchies from private servers.

A few dozen servers like that, sharing select common interest feeds,
would be a strong social, collaboration and research network.

--
Seven

7 <7@no.spam> wrote:
> Are you interested in sharing any feeds with other private NNTP servers?
> I have found a few private NNTPs that I lurk and I'm always looking for
> more. My faves are news.tilde.club and news.grc.com. There are others,
> especially in fidonet / bbs spaces.

I am willing to do, but do not currently have the capabilities set up on
my server to support this (I should probably need to enable IHAVE (it is
implemented, but no access controls are implemented at this time, and it
is not currently enabled nor thoroughly tested) and to implement a program
that can forward messages to other servers, perhaps by cron or anacron).

Maybe in the next few weeks I will try to implement the required
capabilities on my server, and then will post again once I have done so.
However, if you have your own NNTP server, you can post right now (if you
wish) about the requirements. (I may also try to implement a Gemini server
within the next few weeks too, maybe.)

Note that I do not have a static IP address. It is dynamic, but it rarely
changes. The computer is also not always on (although it usually is, and
if it fails one time, it is possible to try again later). Furthermore, I
do not have a huge amount of bandwidth and disk space, and do not want
huge numbers of messages to be sent/received. (I do not have a problem if
other servers it is linked to do not have a static IP address, but if they
lack a static IP address then they must have a domain name.)

I would want to ensure that there is no namespace collision, though. I
had made up "Unusenet" to avoid namespace collision, so it is used for my
own newsgroups. The specification of Unusenet is:

* It starts with "un" and then a number and then a dot. The number is the
number of domain name components, or zero for a special Unusenet namespace
(such as a UUID; none others are currently defined, though).

* After that is the domain name components in the reverse order. This is
the domain name that the namespace belongs to, which would normally be the
server that the newsgroup originated on; it is not necessarily the server
that the newsgroup is potsed to or received from.

* Finally is the rest of the components of the newsgroup name, which can
be whatever the namespace owner wishes them to be.

Unusenet names are supposed to be purely ASCII; if a domain name contains
non-ASCII characters then it is encoded as Punycode. (This does not
restrict the character encoding of the messages, which can be anything;
they do not have to be pure ASCII, but usually are.)

(An example os "un2.org.zzo38computer.admin", which orginates on
"zzo38computer.org" (my computer); however, the name would still be
"un2.org.zzo38computer.admin" even if it were also accessed from a
different NNTP server (it is not changed to the name of that server).
(This is just an example; while such a newsgroup exists, it is probably
not the one that would be wanted to be made available on other servers,
since it is for administration of my own NNTP server.))

I will not require the Unusenet naming scheme to necessarily be used if
including newsgroups from other servers, but if you do not use it, then
you must specify another way to avoid namespace collisions.

> I want to link my own NNTP server to as many of these private ones as
> possible, but without any of the big8 or alt or defunct public
> heirarchies. Basically only organizational / club / association
> hierarchies from private servers.

That is OK; my own NNTP server is not linked with big8, alt, etc. However,
it is also OK with me if others have my newsgroups in addition to big8,
alt, etc; Unusenet is designed to avoid the namespace collision. But if
it is not linked to any servers that have big8 and alt, that is also OK.

> A few dozen servers like that, sharing select common interest feeds,
> would be a strong social, collaboration and research network.

Yes, it would be a good idea.

(Note: I hope I had not made any mistakes in the above. It look like OK
to me, but I may have missed something.)

--
Don't laugh at the moon when it is day time in France.

7 <7@no.spam> wrote:
> Usenet is _awesome_ compared to forums, reddit, twitter, etc. The only
> thing I like more than Usenet is IRC for quicker answers.

I agree. However, IRC is not as good for long form messages, so for that,
NNTP will be better. (Also, not all IRC channels are logged, but public
IRC channels probably should be logged, in my opinion. There is the raw
log format used in the #esolangs and #freeheromesh channels in Libera,
which I think is good. It is the following four fields separated by spaces:
direction (< for receive or > for send), UNIX timestamp, microseconds, and
then the IRC command (which may contain spaces).)

NNTP is also better in other ways, such as being able to store messages
locally, to read and compose messages while not connected to the internet,
to use your own choice of client software with features instead of being
forced to use web pages (which are too messy, and often slow), etc. There
are other advantages, too.

I also like NNTP better than mailing lists, too, instead of having all of
the messages in my email, needing subscription management, etc.

Of course, even if you have NNTP, you can also optionally have email, web
page, etc, too, but you do not have to; it can also do NNTP alone. (You
could also have read-only archives by HTTP or even by Gemini, if wanted.)

> Usenet is censorship-resistant. Hundreds of servers around the world
> carry your message when you post it. All political agendas have no power
> here. There is no bellicose nanny telling us what to think. Such nannies
> have no power to punish us for blasphemy against the party.

Yes, that is another thing that is good.

> By using filters / killfiles on public Usenet, the trolls and spammers
> disappear. If you don't like someone's opinion you can just filter them
> out instead of trying to murder them for blasphemy against the party.

I agree, again; you can use kill files and scoring files.

--
Don't laugh at the moon when it is day time in France.

On 2022-01-06, 7 <7@no.spam> wrote:
> On 1/5/22 11:11 AM, Ben wrote:
>> On 1/5/22 20:20, mbays@sdf.org wrote:
>>> if it drives people to
>>> usenet then I'm happy!
>>
>> You like Usenet???
> Usenet is _awesome_ compared to forums, reddit, twitter, etc. The only
> thing I like more than Usenet is IRC for quicker answers.
Agree completely. I'm interested in decentralisation and would like more
time to delve into it.

> Some of us are doing anonymous, encrypted comms on
> alt.anonymous.messages. Cloak and dagger stuff abounds.
Is there somewhere I can learn abut this? I noticed that group but not
sure what to do. Thanks.

--
Don't be afraid of the deep...
--[ bbs.bottomlessabyss.net | https | telnet=2023 ]--
--[ /query geeknix on libera.chat | tilde.chat ]--

On 1/7/22 2:02 AM, Geeknix wrote:
>> Some of us are doing anonymous, encrypted comms on
>> alt.anonymous.messages. Cloak and dagger stuff abounds.
> Is there somewhere I can learn abut this? I noticed that group but not
> sure what to do. Thanks.

Two answers:

1. The cypherpunk (hard) way: Yamn Remailer
https://sec3.net/yamnhelp/

2. The hodler (easy) way: Bitmessage
https://bitmessage.org
After install, and BEFORE you connect, join these chans, which are
case-sensitive: alt.anonymous.messages, usenet, Bitcoin)

--
Seven