Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why, for projects and similar topics-based discussion, we don't use NNTP instead of Email. Email is good for addressing specific people only, and you're supposed to have been part of the conversation since the beginning so it does apply to personal correspondence but it scales horribly bad for groups of people:

- there is no included history. You need to manually download hand-crafted archives from a bespoke endpoint but then you need to import it all. If you want to quickly read some old message there needs to be a relay to a public inbox type of thing which is a hack

- mailing lists software exist but they are another hack. There is no standard for subscribing or unsubscribing

- projects often have multiple lists anyway so they need to install them all

All of these issues are solved with a network of NNTP servers, and even more: automatic backup of posts because that's how NNTP works, messages are shared accross the network so every message has a specific URI (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5538) and can be addressed directly and retrieved on-the-fly if needed

Not disagreeing with your overall point, but:

> - mailing lists software exist but they are another hack. There is no standard for subscribing or unsubscribing

There is a standard for unsubscribing: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8058

And for subscribing, you can often open a mailto: link.

No "good" NNTP clients, maybe besides Gnus and slrn, which are rather obscure.

Gmane was relatively popular, and it was great but went down for a long time, which probably further obscured NNTP. IDK if everyone who used to use it is aware that it's up again, now at http://gmane.io/

Those are both definitely good clients. And the idea to use NNTP is good, too, but has almost no chance of taking off, for social reasons.

DFeed is the best NNTP clientI have come across https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

> No "good" NNTP clients

Thunderbird works on most platforms.

> Gmane was relatively popular, and it was great but went down for a long time

Some mailing lists are now archived using public inbox[1]. There are several ways to access it including via NNTP.

[1] https://public-inbox.org/README.html

Didn't know Thunderbird did NNTP, thanks!

Can you get your own mailing lists on public-inbox, or would you have to self host? I'd love to self host git and a mailing list but setting up mailman/sympa/etc. seems to be too big a task. I was thinking setting up a wiki as a replacement for my small personal projects...

I've brought up the same point in a number of threads that have brought up mailing lists over the years. In the specific case of mailing lists like the ones used for Linux kernel and git development, I believe many participants host their own SMTP instances and use them to send and receive messages and have had those set ups for a long time.

If they were to switch to NNTP, they would either have to:

1. Create a new group on usenet (and have to somehow filter out all the spam posted to it or everyone will have to keep their NNTP client kill file up to date)

or

2. They each would have to host their own NNTP server and each one would have to add enough peering servers (incoming and outgoing) to ensure that articles are propogated to them and articles they post are propagated to others

or

3. The maintainer would have to set up a authoritative NNTP server and allow read access, but then have to add accounts for those who need write access (in order to allow them to submit patches).

Continuing to use SMTP allows them to essentially choose option 2, but not have to set up peering servers since DNS MX records handle propagating the emails they send.

That said, having a NNTP mirror of a mailing list like gmane[1] and public-inbox[2] provides the best of both worlds. You get the benefits of NNTP for reading the mailing list, but get the benefits of propagation via SMTP.

[1] https://gmane.io/

[2] https://public-inbox.org/README.html

Given gmane's funding crises over the years, it feels hard to recommend relying on such a service long term. (Though I've certainly relied on it over the years for a number of different reasons.)

What we almost need is an NNTP 2.0 that makes it easier for smaller federated groups. (Maybe this is a good use for ActivityPub and/or Matrix?)

(Public-Inbox is new to me and at first skim seems to cover some interesting bases here. I'm not thrilled at the AGPL licensing though.)

> What we almost need is an NNTP 2.0 that makes it easier for smaller federated groups.

We've had that with XMPP and Publish-Subscribe for years: if the project has a server with this XEP enabled, any authorized user (registered anywhere) can post any type of content.

PubSub alone isn't a great replacement for NNTP. (It's maybe a replacement for SMTP.) The reasons for an NNTP 2.0 (as mentioned above) are more about storage/forwarding, if you want access to the back history as opposed to just live updates. You can build such things on top of a PubSub protocol, as ActivityPub is at heart still a PubSub protocol, but has a lot more storage/forwarding concerns added on top, as an example.

XMPP Core is a replacement for SMTP. XMPP pubsub is much more than just pubsub, take a look at https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html. There is everything about querying and forwarding, in this XEP and in https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html. There is precedent for posting content and replying inside XMPP's pubsub as documented in https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html; the same can be used for general discussions

Fair points. I wasn't aware of any of these tools, but then like the majority of the world I haven't actively used XMPP in years (which is obviously among its largest cons today).

My intent wasn't to diminish your initial comment, just that a protocol is a technical answer to a problem that is more probably a societal one. It takes time and effort to commit to another communication protocol, especially when it's not the core of what you're doing as a project. Maybe what is needed is not just a protocol but proper tools to make it easy to use (and the bar with the simplicity of email is very high)

public-inbox seems to be the best of both worlds indeed. Interestingly it fits your option 1: posting is open and the admin is in charge of handling spam.

But public-inbox goes way further with other means of pulling, and the easy and trusted replication gives it the same status as the code: the repo is the source of truth, not the email endpoint. I could see projects using that and, say, gitolite as the two main bricks for running a project. Now all we need is a simple CI/CD system that is designed to run on its own rather than in a specific ecosystem

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