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Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Usenet :)

RSS is probably easier to layer on top of those new fangled HTTP-over-P2P networks like IPFS.

Heck, I remember proposals for combining RSS and BitTorrent, so an RSS feed could be spread via BitTorrent, with incremental updates being applied, and with each entry containing BitTorrent magnet links. This was proposed as a distributed way to provide podcasts ("podcatching"). Not sure if it got implemented.

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Usenet is, unfortunately, ancient and arcane enough that a vast amount of the the current veteran dev people never ever heard of it. It's an awesome thing, even though it has it's capacity limits, and it really should be revived ( and not the way it is at the moment, as a torrent replacement ).

NNTP is one of the most underrated protocols. It's a distributed superset of email + RSS + twitter.

There are parts of it that have aged really badly, though. I was working on an NNTP-related project last year. Article numbers and threading are a bit crappy. The conflation of messages and commands (like cancel) also sat rather uncomfortably with me.

I was impressed with it as a piece of history, but more thorough exposure left me with a much decreased interest in building a system on it. More modern approaches to pubsub feel more natural (and are also more fun to work with!)

Yes of course, RSS over a distributed channel works as well!

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