Seriously though, I’m tired of people starting new social networks with investor money. Those investors want their money back and the entrepreneurs starting the social networks are going to need to pay them back with money obtained from the members.
I want the USENET model back. It was the original Fediverse. Community is an outcome of the protocol.
@standaloneSA Usenet was great and it was great being able to use any client I wanted to connect. I enjoyed lots of tech and automotive groups on there.
But the flamewars were brutal, and once it became a vehicle for distributing binary content, its idealized use was destroyed as it became a precursor to the dark web.
@kc @standaloneSA So 20 years ago, apparently, I wrote this thing that would syndicate blogs to NNTP via CSS classes, and I forget the details on the newsreader back into my comments, but threads suggest it was working... https://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/6704.html
I think, despite the enthusiasm, I only ever had one other user of it.
@kc @standaloneSA And I think this is the earlier thread. https://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/6357.html
It's been 2 decades, but I'm sure the code is in Perl, my blog is Perl+PostgreSQL running with CGI, though from those comments I was clearly thinking in terms of parsed HTML over HTTP. I'm not saying it's a good idea, and running INN is a PITA, but I did it once...
Some groups were/are moderated. comp.lang.c++.moderated had less content than comp.lang.c++, but it was better quality due to the mods. I suspect other groups were similar. Still depends on the hard work of volunteer moderators though.
Matt Simmons
lanefu
Dan Lyke
Kévin ⏚
not a martian, honest
Anthony Williams
Theriac
Dan Kennedy
Garrett Wollman