Re: Young people peering

On 2024-04-17 18:07:39 +0000, SugarBug said:

On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:39:50 -0000 (UTC)
doctor@doctor.nl2k.ab.ca (The Doctor) wrote:
 

Getting high schools to a Usenet project should be
the advocacy of everyone here!

 Moderated NNTP newsgroups are well-suited to academic environments.
 In certain academic and scientific circles much communication is still done via email using clients that still have built-in NNTP capability.

When I was working at different companies, I always wondered why all of them use mailing lists instead of local newsgroups. Local newsgroups just make much more sense, and make many things easier.
Not sure if access to global Usenet would be useful in businness environment, but local NNTP server is a good idea, in my opinion. I was never in a position to propose any changes, though.
Quick google search shows that the same thing was proposed many times in the past, for example, a book Practical Internet Groupware by Jon Udell starts with a chapter called "Lotus Notes, Web Bulletin Boards, and NNTP Newsgroups":
<https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practical-internet-groupware/1565925378/ch01s07.html>

All that we lacked was our own dedicated news server. When I

installed one—and eventually, several assigned to different roles—we began to learn what can be done with a dedicated NNTP conferencing system that operates apart from the worldwide network of replicating Usenet servers. Conferencing servers are tremendous assets. In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, I’ll show some of the ways to use them, and in Chapter 13, I’ll show how to install and configure them. But first, let me anticipate the question you should probably be asking now: “If NNTP servers are so darned useful, how come hardly anybody seems to use them?” Thereby hangs a tale.
Not sure what the tale is, it seems that full text of the book is still unavailable for free.
Here is another article by Jon Udell where he talks about pretty much the same thing, "Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration":
<https://jonudell.net/GroupwareReport.html>

This year, the Usenet celebrates its 20th anniversary. It's the

grandfather of all groupware systems: a planetary discussion network that supports tens of thousands of virtual communities. At their best, these shared spaces enable groups of like-minded individuals to collaborate rather effectively. At their worst, they're overrun by spam, smut, and nonsense. This degradation poisons our notion of the Usenet and, what's worse, prevents us from fully understanding and exploiting some really useful, and well-established, collaborative tools -- NNTP (Net News Transfer Protocol) servers and clients.

We can, and probably should, re-invent the Usenet. Even when it works

well -- there are, for example, many high-quality moderated Usenet groups -- its replication scheme has become terribly inefficient. Any given Usenet node receives and processes vastly more messages than anyone attached to that node will ever read. Why? When the Usenet grew up, there was no such thing as a near-universal real-time-connected data network. Replication was the only way to propagate messages worldwide over diverse and intermittently-connected networks. Today newsreaders can connect instantaneously to many different news servers, just as browsers connect to many different Web sites.

Let's imagine an alternative Usenet. It has the same number of

virtual communities and the same number of nodes. But each node is responsible for just one or several shared spaces, not all of them. (NNTP replication might still mirror nodes to a few locations around the world, to improve local access, but the storage and processing costs of replication would be vastly reduced.) When each node processes vastly fewer messages, the focus can shift from quantity to quality. Here are some of the implications:

...

I wonder what he thinks about NNTP and Usenet now. Seems that he is still active, perhaps someone can email him or invite him here.