Re: lamers on IRC

[Thomas Lord <lord@basiscraft.com>]

FWIW, a modern, p2p, group-structured system with at least pictures,
short video/audio, very basic hypertext etc... appeals to me
as a way to try to help free people from untrustworthy social
media because I think it spans a nice range of use cases.  For
example, there could be some hubs that aggregate real climate
scientists, or real music experts, or whatever -- and "everyone"
would want to get groups from those big dogs and in the same
system, local (geographic or logical "local") backwaters
could exist.   PLUS - and this is big - it would create a symbiotic
IRL social network among hosts and users.

That, not the details of history, is my main point.  I'm not
just being nostalgic (I think / hope).

-t


On 2022-05-27 22:04, Thomas Lord wrote:
>> Uhm, "upstream host", is that another computer that receives
>> to the same feed as you so thus gets your posts or what is it?
> 
> 
> Example from real life.  In high school I interned at a dinky little
> start-up that was a net-news edge node.   The system administrators
> at that little company set up an internal net news host the same way
> someone might bring in an old ping pong table - to improve the work
> environment.
> 
> That company dialed out to a more established company down the
> road that, as a regional industry courtesy, not only hosted its
> own internal net news host but connected to even bigger fish
> upstream and casually offered peering to local small companies.
> 
> 
>>> Google used its economic power and social influence to first
>>> centralize what was left of mainstream netnews and then to
>>> kill it off.
>> 
>> Well, you can tune into nntp.aioe.org with Gnus this very
>> instant and see how useful it is. But killed - no.
> 
> Yes, I am being a bit absolutist there.
> 
> I suppose to be a little more accurate I would say that they
> killed it as a way of sharing groups that had developed into
> widely used global connected social media (relative to the scales of 
> its
> day).
> 
> To be sure, the not-really-multi-media email-style message format
> didn't exactly help sustain interested in net news.
> 
> -t