Hello, I know that the fediverse contains many challengers to the walled garden approach of the main stream social media options. But, unless I miss comprehend, the fediverse isn’t anything new, more a return to how things were in the the past. Case in point Newsgroups. Why aren’t they mentioned in the same breath as Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon?
Because they’re ancient, depreciated, and technically obsolete.
For example: usenet groups are essentially unmoderated, which allows spammers, trolls, and bad actors free reign to do what it is they do. This was not a design consideration when usenet was being developed, because the assumption was all the users would have a name, email, and traceable identity so if you acted like a stupid shit, everyone already knew exactly who you were, where you worked/went to school, and could apply actual real-world social pressure to you to stop being a stupid fuck.
This, of course, does not work anymore, and has basically been the primary driver of why usenet has just plain died as a discussion forum because you just can’t have an unmoderated anything without it turning into the worst of 4chan, twitter, and insert-nazi-site-of-choice-here combined with a nonstop flood of spam and scams.
So it died, everyone moved on, and I don’t think that there’s really anyone who thinks the global usenet backbone is salvagable as a communications method.
HOWEVER, you can of course run your own NNTP server and limit access via local accounts and simply not take the big global feed. It’s useful as a protocol, but then, at that point, why use NNTP over a forum software, or Lemmy (even if it’s not federating), or whatever?
This was not a design consideration when usenet was being developed, because the assumption was all the users would have a name, email, and traceable identity so if you acted like a stupid shit, everyone already knew exactly who you were, where you worked/went to school, and could apply actual real-world social pressure to you to stop being a stupid fuck.
The first email spammer got a call from the US Air Force Major in charge of ARPANET and nobody send spam for a while. We should have kept doing that.
For example: usenet groups are essentially unmoderated
That is highly dependent on the newsgroup. Many newsgroups WERE heavily moderated. The ones in the alt branch were not, generally.
But, say, comp.os.linux? It was very moderated.
Additionally, a couple of projects tried to put a really nice, forum-like UI on top of NNTP, and it worked pretty well. The problem was a lack of uptake, really, because “Well, we have facebook and reddit already!”
One of the “bigger” attempts at this was done when forums were basically dying, and everyone was moving to facebook and reddit, away from forums.
I miss forums. I used to host one for a guild on a game I played. We used the forum for quest hints, and long term planning. But then used icq and the like for quick communication.
Forums seem like the most natural use case for ActivityPub. I’m over the Reddit style UX, and absolutely ready to take a step back and try to pick an older jumping off point.
Probably for most of the same reasons that IRC isn’t mentioned for fediverse chat, the main one being that they don’t use one of the newer federation protocols. They don’t talk the same federation protocol language, so you can’t really group them under the same category.
