Re: resources about mailing lists vs. forums (e.g. Discourse)

["J.B. Nicholson" <jbn@forestfield.org>]

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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