I understand the wish not to be dependent on a third party - but isn't Twilio such a dependency?
So as long as other sms gateways/delivery services are available, his dependency isn't "Twilio", it's "an sms gateway/delivery service".
That depends of the depth of Twilio-specific integration and the ease of abstraction of course. Author mentions converting custom statuses and the like.
Do you have any recommendations for server-side software/libraries, or docs beyond the original RFCs? I've idly contemplated various uses in the past, but never really fully understood how the various bits would go together.
* Run an existing news server (INN2 https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/), and add scripts around it, or:
* Make a small server that talks NNTP and does exactly what you need
I've been doing the latter a number of times (most recently on Feedbase https://feedbase.org/ where the NNTP-part is written in Perl, and I am working on and off on a server (in Haskell) to run a blog where NNTP is the primary interface for the author; not quite finished yet), Gmane/Gwene http://gwene.org/ does the former.
NNTP is a pretty simple protocol - an easy way to get going is to create a server that reads lines from a socket and replies when it recognizes something, connect an nntp-client and see what it sends and check the RFC for what is expected back, and then just go from there.
I'll have to poke around with feedbase and see what you're up to. My (probably badly though-out) idea was a somewhat generic server / API adapter that could be hooked up to make less terrible interfaces for something like HN or reddit, similar to how bitlbee does IM <-> IRC.