U'll Be King Of The Stars wrote:
Usenet was one of my favorite things about the internet. I would love
for it to be revived.
Usenet is still around and working quite well. Usenet might not be as
popular as it once was but it's not dead. In fact, I'd say that the
principled response to hosting discussion forums which respect freedom of
speech is to encourage people to use Usenet more (or set up any
widely-distributed newsgroup network and use that too).
This cause should be taken up along side a principled reaction to RSS feeds
-- a decentralized means of promoting one's own material that doesn't rely
on adding another possibility for censorship.
Corporate media tells us that RSS is dying[1] but that frame of debate puts
aside any discussion of whose interests are served by moving away from
decentralized standards we are all free to use and toward proprietary
software (sometimes referred to as "walled gardens") such as Apple's
iTunes. There's quite a pressure to move users away from decentralized free
standards toward single points of failure and censorship. I'm sure that
there are some people who stand to benefit from pushing this view with
email, despite no clear improvement made in doing so. It seems to me that a
free software discussion on this is needed and should not accept handing
users over to software proprietors.
[1]
https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/google-readers-death-is-proof-that-rss-always-suffered-from-lack-of-consumer-appeal/
for example -- this author wants us to see Google Reader going away in
terms of giving Google's business desires undeserved primacy, not
recognizing the lack of software freedom from Google in this, and giving no
perspective on Google's penchant for continuing services that help it spy
on users. It's unsurprising that the author tacitly suggests switching to
other spying mechanisms including Facebook.
At the time I wanted to run my own INN node eventually. By the time it
became possible for me to set up anything resembling a
server-on-the-Internet, Usenet was pretty much over.
I suggest that you help the people at FreedomBox find a way to host an NNTP
server on FreedomBox. It would be great to have a news network which
included a lot of FreedomBoxes sharing copies of posts using an encrypted
NNTP connection. I can't say if INN is the right program to do this job,
but that's a technical detail. Some free software NNTP server should be
able to let FreedomBox users easily host some newsgroups with reasonable
default settings aimed at letting novices easily get started with peers.
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