Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?
Yes. But you have to do it in the way that Usenet was built and you may not like that.<p>I was intelca!cem on Usenet. Modem charges (phone calls) weren&#x27;t free outside the local calling zone, and places like Berkeley (ucbvax) were often &quot;hubs&quot; that could use university resources to move data over longer distances. Every node had <i>all</i> the data, so system administrators had to come up with schemes for what to delete and when. Even though it was &quot;open&quot; people regularly railed against &quot;the cabal&quot; which where the folks who essentially controlled the namespace so you want a new comp.sys.&lt;architecture&gt; newsgroup, the cabal had to sign off on that or the other nodes wouldn&#x27;t accept your postings to it. That fight spawned the &quot;alt&quot; tree and it allowed for an affirmative choice of &quot;constrained&quot; posts or &quot;freeforall&quot; posts. The &quot;risky&quot; groups distributed binaries, some of which were CSAM and some of which were pirated software. This lead to a lot of nodes not carrying them (easier than filtering out the bad stuff). For history, &quot;pathing&quot; was something like sun!ucbvax!intelca!cem which meant Sun sent things to ucbvax, and ucbvax would forward things to intelca. So if ucbvax decides not to &quot;carry&quot; a newsgroup, then no one down stream from them would get those newsgroups. (this lead to ISPs advertising &quot;full&quot; Usenet feeds in the 90&#x27;s)<p>So what would a &quot;modern&quot; Usenet look like? Consider; Things that were expensive then (long distance and storage) are cheap now and things that were cheap then (class C subnets) but are expensive now. Usenet was hosted on netnews which was described by the netnew transport protocol or nntp. Just like the web is hosted on the hyper text transport protocol http. First and foremost a modern Usenet needs a modern foundational transport protocol. This would be IPV6 based (lots of available addresses) and end to end encrypted. You could implement this with carrier grade NAT or you could use tailscale. The latter is &quot;easy&quot; and a proof of concept would be easy to slap together. I think of this as engineering deliverable #1, a protocol for peer to peer newsgroup sharing with IPV6 addresses and end to end encryption.<p>From a cost perspective, that needs to be born by the user. Fortunately people already pay for their Internet access and computer(s), so really it just requires dedicating a computer to be your &quot;node&quot; in the hierarchy.<p>This gives us engineering deliverable #2, a repository of name to address mappings. While this could easily be provided by a bespoke DNS with its own set or root servers. The limitation and risk of third party DNS servers is well known. In 1990 I designed a system for NIS+ which allowed clients to start from zero trust and an introduction to a &quot;server&quot; they could trust, to allow for elaborating trust across a much larger network. It was implemented by a brilliant engineer (a guy name Kamal Anand) who created a cache service for keeping a credential cache of trusted servers. The advantage of such a system is that &quot;who you trust&quot; is something you get to decide, and you can decide not to trust servers that others trust or to trust servers that others don&#x27;t.<p>Engineering deliverable #3 would be a core &quot;server&quot; which exchanges information with other servers it trusts, posts that it has seen that others have not, and presenting posts it receives to others once it receives them. It has functions to list posts, and to work with a client to change visibility rules (read&#x2F;unread subscribed&#x2F;unsubscribed etc). I will admit that one of the areas where looking at how gmail was implemented most impressed me was the idea that messages were the &quot;general ledger&quot; and folders, state, Etc. were just labels on the transactions. This works really well because delivery can be one linear write to a single blob, with individual &quot;messages&quot; and their attachements by addressable content into that blob. So the indexes stay small, the messages could be written to write-once optical media if you wanted.<p>Engineering deliverable #4 is a client, that authenticates to &quot;your&quot; server from any connection point on the Internet (remember I said tailscale makes this super easy), that runs on any of your devices (phone, tablet, laptop), and allows you to interact with the service; list, read, write, delete, classify posts.<p>I believe the key to financial success here is that the only &quot;cost&quot; to host this service is equivalent to running a dozen DNS server instances. All the hardware, storage, and connectivity costs are born by the client through systems they already pay for. As a client you could choose to trust a mapping server or maybe trust the server your friend is using with a choice to trust whomever that server trusts.<p>Finally, you would have to accept that in all likelyhood you and your buddies would be the only &quot;cool kids&quot; on this service for the first couple of years of its existence. Lots of muscle memory out there for existing sites (reddit et alia) and so a lot of &quot;oh I read that on neuvoUsenet you probably didn&#x27;t see it&quot; experiences. Investing in outreach to specific groups would benefit things greatly.<p>The bottom line is that I consider this both a good idea and technically doable but it is a labor of love at present, it is by design difficult to monetize.