Re: Note - ISP Screwed Up - Can WRITE But Not SEE

"186282@ud0s4.net" <186283@ud0s4.net> writes:

  There must be something in-between usenet and 'X' - http
  rather than p119. Simple interface but hooks for better
  alternative reader apps.

There’s multiple options out there. However by now Usenet users for the
most part have either found alternatives that suit them, or are so stuck
in their ways that nothing other than Usenet will do...

  Remember BBS's ? The trick was that there was usually only ONE
  server holding all the messages. Depending, this is not necessarily
  terrible. The spreads-it-around nature of usenet is interesting,
  good redundancy, but the number of feed servers seems to be
  decreasing, fewer and fewer sources for the articles.

I’m pretty sure most of my Usenet peers are essentially hobbyists. It’s
not hard to carry a text feed, a cheap Linux VPS is more than adequate.
But hobbyists generally don’t often want the hassle of a nontrivial
userbase.

  As for binaries ... you just set a reasonable limit for msg size,
  and forbid .part's. A detector for ascii-encoded bin will work too.

Yes, it’s a few lines of config in my filter.

  As such, a modern BBS - prob with one or two fail-over servers -
  would be the middle path. Structure everything like usenet,
  just NOT usenet. Could even pipe in actual usenet articles,
  for as long as they last.
>
  Again though the "liability" issue for un-PC content. It's sort of a
  prob in the USA but a much bigger prob in the EU and beyond. As
  said, such a system needs to be located in a who-knows/cares-country
  where it's hard to get at legally.

Sites that can’t be reached legally get blocked (at least when they’re
big enough to matter). Not completely insurmountable (VPNs, proxies,
etc) but certainly a barrier to widespread adoption.

An advantage of a distributed system (Usenet, ActivityPub, etc) is that
each node can deal with its prevailing legal environment without much
impacting the rest of the network. UK Usenet hosts were taking down CSAM
since the 1990s, with zero impact on anyone else (no doubt the UK wasn’t
the only jurisidiction doing it but I had no visibility of that).

A closely related disadvantage is that there’s not always much you can
do about certain kinds of misbehavior originating on other nodes short
of blocking entire nodes, if their operators aren’t cooperative. On
Usenet, Google was the worst recent offender: huge amounts of spam, and
operators who didn’t care at all, but also huge numbers of legitimate
users who would be lost if you blocked the whole site.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/