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Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

Only a small note: we have had a free, functional, decentralized social network in the past, even supported by thing like Microsoft Outlook. It's still there, despite semi-abandoned state, today. It have a name, of course: nntp news.

All we need if we want a free alternative to ANY social network is being back on nntp. Of course we can add features to it, we can start to shake heads and think seeing the role of IT today it it's time to buy serious mail solution, perhaps a VPS and a domain name, perhaps create a small home-server that mirror public/semipublic personal stuff from the VPS to us so we can easily jump from a vendor to another without change anything from our mail address to our datas.

IT is not only a game anymore, it start to be a serious thing even for casual people, better know a bit of it and be prepared.

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I have been looking for an NNTP server that I can run privately, with a minimum of fuss, user accounts and encryption, so that I can host one for our family (previously we used G+, but that is being shut down).

I haven't found one that fits the bill.

Here you go - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed (news aggregator, newsgroup client, web newsreader and IRC bot) -- powers https://forum.dlang.org/, NNTP server and IRC bot.

HTTP itself is federated and decentralized.

Yes, but not websites.

How so?

? A newsgroups live on many different news servers, hosted by many different subjects, potentially including it's members newsserver. People who host server can choose what groups to serve and with what privilege (read only, max x post per days etc) but do NOT control posts groups content (posts/threads), any member can and normally mirror a (recent) snapshot of group contents on it's own personal spooler etc. Essentially no one can control the entire system.

A website typically run on a dedicated server, not mirrored elsewhere, under the complete control of it's owner, and hosting. So while no one really "own" usenet different subjects own, can censor, destroy etc a website and their reader can't really do much about that.

We have of course other types of site, ZeroNet is a nice example, but they suffer many problem, they are far less available and known compared to usenet and their "ownership" is still partially in singe subject hands.

A simple practical example: what happen to your HN post if HN disappear? How can you or us "posters" united can do in that case? Vs what happen if a newsserver disappear?

HTTP is not natively created for decentralized mirroring/replication (e.g. torrents) or third-party annotating.

The internet as a whole: yea, anyone can spin up a site, though that's not really the point. By that logic Facebook is federated, since anyone can spin up a facebook-like.

Individual websites: the sole owner of the domain name determines all servers that can serve content, thus all behavior, which is pretty conclusively non-federated.

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