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This is the key problem with decentralised systems. They simply can't innovate as quickly as centralised systems.

We saw this with usenet and we also saw it with IRC. IRC really is what slack was, 30years ahead of it. However, IRC has so many essential missing features it never caught on - push notifications, saving your state when offline, admin controls, etc. I know some of these were solved with extensions and workarounds (having a shell connect to irc an then you connect to the shell for persistence for example) but it's a huge hack. This compares to Slack or Teams where they can push a back and front end update to millions/billions(?) of users in a very short space of time to add additional functionality.

This is another reason why all the decentralised 'blockchain' things would have struggled (on top of many others).

I think this argument is seductive but wrong because it ignores an invisible elephant in the room: funding.

Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're engineers and so we see technical problems first.

Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.

Free volunteer developer work tends to stop at the level of polish with which developers are comfortable, which is usually command line interaction and fairly manual processes. Developers generally have to be paid to develop new features and polish those features for the general audience, which is why there are precious few open source systems used by anyone other than developers.

Those that do exist tend to be subsidized by huge companies for the purpose of "commoditizing your compliments" or as tools to herd users into an ecosystem that has upsell opportunities built into it. Examples: Chrome, any open source client for a SaaS service, etc.

Non-profits can fund to some extent, but the truth is that polished feature-rich easy to use software is extraordinarily expensive to produce. A system that a developer can create in their spare time might cost millions to render usable to non-developers. Computers are actually very hard to use. We just don't see this because we're accustomed to it. Making them easy to use is a gigantic undertaking and is often far more difficult and complex than making something work at the algorithmic level.

Centralized systems with built-in economic models like SaaS or commercial software tend to triumph because they can fund the polish necessary to reach a wider audience. A wider audience means exponentially larger network effects. See Metcalfe's Law.

Cryptocurrency could have offered an alternative model but failed for entirely different reasons: perverse incentives that attract scammers. In crypto by far the most profitable thing to do is build a fake project that can appear just credible enough to attract retail buyers onto whom you can dump your tokens. There is no structural incentive to stick with a project and really develop it because all the money is made up front through the initial offering. This also ruins the ecosystem because "the bad chases away the good." Scammers make legitimate people not want to go anywhere near crypto, transforming the whole ecosystem into a "bad neighborhood."

I'd add, polish often means different things to different people. For example, failure planning and risk management often only happen when there is funding.

There also was no content moderation.

> Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're engineers and so we see technical problems first.

> Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.

You hit the nail on the head. Usenet was very much a "back channel" in its early history, with school and corporate IT people setting up feeds on the quiet. Indeed, it began outside the Internet, using dialup UUCP links to exchange news and mail.

Email addresses were "bang paths" where you had to route your mail to its destination. If your outside mail gateway was foovax, an outgoing address might be like "foovax!decwrl!ihnp4!uiucuxa!example" instead of "example@uiucuxa.uiuc.edu". In posts, it was a convention to specify your email address path from one of the famous well-connected sites.

One of the biggest early players was (surprise) Bell Labs. If the name "ihnp4" rings a bell to you, you might be as old or older than me. :) That was a central hub for the UUCP network, both news and mail. I wonder if any AT&T bean counters knew about it back in the day, or, getting back to the original point, how many bean counters found out about Usenet in their respective companies and forced it out?

> However, IRC has so many essential missing features it never caught on

IRC never caught on? IRC was extremely popular throughout the 90's and into the 2000's

You're right; but I read that as IRC didn't implement ("catch on to") those essential features as technical feasibility marched forward.

> extremely popular

Email and the web were extremely popular. Facebook is extremely popular. Very few people have ever known what IRC is.

Decentralised systems solve this problem with a BDFL, which many have used successfully. Look at Linux, for example.

> without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents

Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the room. To the question "why isn't there a decentralized open protocol free software X" the answer is moderation. Think or it as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by inadequate moderation ensued.

Obviously, this is why 4chan died back in 2012. If only they had moderation, they might still be around today.

4chan has moderation.

They're a special niche, and I believe they've been forked multiple times over moderation disasters resulting in 8chan etc.

If 4chan "breaks cover" into the mainstream in the way that, say, Facebook has, it will make for some very entertaining Congressional hearings.

4chan has a million jannies, it's heavily moderated...

There were plenty of well moderated newsgroups actually.

A moderated newsgroup had all messages going through the moderator's system, with their programs deciding whether or not the message should be forwarded to the rest of the newsgroup. This doesn't necessarily mean that a human read all messages either.

Some of the oldest flamewars I've participated in are about moderated vs unmoderated USENET newsgroups. It amuses me that we're still debating the issue today.

What kind of moderation programs were people using then? Word filters? I can't imagine anything that isn't both easy to circumvent and likely to catch innocent posts merely quoting a "bad" word.

People used Killfiles [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file

I don't think a "kill file" was the same as "moderation".

A kill file is "User X is tired of seeing User Y, so X stops reading posts from Y". Everyone else can still read Y.

A moderator is "Moderator is tired of seeing User Y, so Y cannot post to Newsgroup anymore". A much stronger action.

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Its been a few decades since I was part of any Usenet though. So maybe I'm mis-remembering the lingo. Or are you saying that the moderators used kill-files that somehow applied to the whole newsgroup?

Because... the later would make sense. But I really don't know how things worked back then.

The machinery for a moderated newsgroup works by the news server you post an article to having a list of moderator email addresses for moderated groups. Instead of posting your article the server emails it to the moderator. The mod will then either just discard it, or else post it to their own news server with an Approved header to say it's moderated (and these days some crypto signing stuff). Then the post gets propagated as usual.

The "approve/deny/edit" stuff is handled by moderation software, which in principle can do anything you like.

No, killfiles were at an individual level. But they were more than "I'm tired of seeing User Y", as you could also plonk text patterns and the like.

IIRC group-wide moderation was handled per-post in that every post was approved by hand.

> IIRC group-wide moderation was handled per-post in that every post was approved by hand.

Definitely not. The kinds of "mistakes" I've seen in moderation back then suggests that the process was highly automated.

Moderated Usenet is way more similar to modern Reddit than people probably realize.

There's a third layer: the servers. Newsgroups relied on servers propagating messages to other servers as well as delivering them to end users, and they could have various types of filters.

The same sort of model exists in modern distributed systems like Mastodon/ActivityPub. I can block a user from another server or an entire server individually, or my server admin can block them from communicating with anyone on my server.

What's missing that I think will be required for anything that gets popular enough is a means of sharing blocklists automatically, preferably with some machine-readable details so that they're useful even when servers have different rules (e.g. I want to subscribe to bans from Foo if the ban is for hate speech, but not for porn).

I wasn't "tech awakened" at this time, so I simply didn't know which programs were used.

What I can say is that plenty of spammers would have one or two posts on Newsgroups, before the mods would catch them and ban their email address.

Depending on the Newsgroup, I'm sometimes "new users" would have all of their posts reviewed before their posts were forwarded to everyone else. But after being added to some kind of whitelist, they could say whatever they wanted (well, until a flamewar caused them to go over the line and get banned).

So similar tools as moderators use today on Reddit / IRC / whatever. Or at least, it felt like that to me. Maybe it differed in implementation, but the overall effect was the same.

It wasn't like programmers were less creative or productive than they are now. The languages were fully capable of doing anything on a server you could do now. It was mostly C. Programmers were creative and smart, just like now, and could implement anything, albeit ground-up since there were fewer existing building blocks to reuse.

A lot of sophisticated anti-spam software depended on some sophisticated anti-anti-spam showing up first, and there is a lot more of that now for sure.

Even now forums rely on manual after-the-fact moderation and not just algorithmic pre-moderation.

Several programs are available to do it: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderated_Newsgroups#Moderation_S...

The type and quality of moderation is up to the moderation team. Might be automatic, might involve a review by a human for each post.

As someone else already mentioned, there are groups which were configured to be moderated but have no moderators at all to approve posts. Either they disappeared or there never were any. To participate in these groups you have to set the "Approved:" header in your post yourself. Obviously that would also be the way to circumvent the moderation process for any other moderated group. The countermeasure is that the moderators send out a cancel control message which instructs all the newsservers receiving it or at least those who honor cancel messages, to delete this specific message.

There was moderation. There was even a newsgroup that probably has some overlap with here that required you to circumvent it in order to post.

"Moderation" is a terrible excuse used by the corporate types as a reason to stick in their safe walled gardens.

We had moderation on Usenet. It was simple, but damn, did it work. We had plonka lists (client selected ignored users), keyword scoring, server level scoring, some anti-spam. There was EARLY work in Bayesian filters built in to clients, but was too late for the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as anti-piracy.)

But lets look corporate moderation. It's done in secret, with vague rules that may or may not be stated, and by content moderation farms that use and abuse people. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-content-moderators-... . Or worse yet, you fool people in faux-ownership (reddit) and get them to do your moderation for you. Well, that is unless you do a bad job and get your subreddit banned for "low/no moderation".

I'd much rather see everything, and craft my own blocklists as I see fit. You know, just like Mastodon. Sure, there's some fediblocks at admin-level over pervasive content from a single server. But aside admin tasks, its pretty damn sweet. And it's loads better than the shit that happens over on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook.

We, the technologically literate, are not the target audience. Client-side filtering requires awareness of client-side filtering. How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun ! And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment. By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ?

Enter the party, meet regulars, meet new faces, enjoy a drink and don't even think about safety. Sure, you can manage it yourself for a birthday party at your home but at larger scales even the wild rave party thrown in an abandoned hangar out there will have some form of institutionalized enforcement, even if they are not corporate security.

Yes, that means that successful large public places tend towards bland - the same reason why successful edgy underground dives are small affairs and their character can't survive growth.

> We, the technologically literate, are not the target audience.

Highly disagree. It's the early adopters of ANY platform, hardware, or whatever that drive real organic demand and adoption. And those early adopters ARE exactly that: technologically literate.

Alienating that group is how you get relegated to the "Digg v4" area of history.

> How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun !

How many Facebook or Reddit users even HAVE the capability of client side anything? The big threads are that Reddit's killing most API access unless you pay a pound of flesh. And Facebook does enough horrible things in their coding that makes it impossible to even screen-scrape. The text "Sponsored" shows up as shittery like "essprnodo".

For those gated islands, you'd need their permission to really do any sort of client side anything.

Places like Mastodon make blocking trivial. Ive shared that link, and no, you don't need to know about Bayseian weights or whatever new mod scheme you want to make. Its there, the initial functions are easy-peasy, and the API hooks are there to add whatever you want.

> And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment.

And that already is a major problem on the corporate side. Reddit calls it "brigading". HN has chill-down scripts to defuse flamewars. Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all have mass-reporting as harassment. There's even current 4Chan threads to organize just that. Sure seems like an unsolved problem, not just "unsolved for federated systems".

> By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ?

Irrelevant. Someone in another area could read content that is illegal to them. That's *their* responsibility, not mine. As long as I follow the laws in my jurisdiction and where my server is located, I'm fine. And 17 USC 512 covers me as long as I do good-faith DMCA process.

> <example of comparing physical real world with raves/alcohol/drugs with online "dangers">

And in your latter half, your other problem is that you're equating online "safety" with in-person bodily safety with alcohol and drugs. Those 2 aren't even remotely the same, and its laughable that you'd try to compare them.

If someone is coming on to you in a sexual manner, and your "No" isnt effectively heard or acknowledged, you have a big problem. If someone uploads a bad image (say, animal torture, for something abhorrent), you can block the user, the server, report the user to their/your server admins. You can also choose not to show images. It's terrible, but physical assault is no comparison to a bad image or terrible text.

Someone in another area could read content that is illegal to them. That's their responsibility, not mine

Unless you serve people from the EU or sell things to US customers like bitcoin.

There's no reason a private/paid service addon to a client can't work for filtering. Been thinking similarly for Mastadon, in that you can pretty easily have a gated experience, and get top ranking for Android/iOS client use with a monthly service that includes filtering with relatively sane defaults, but toggle-able filtering/reporting.

You can use fdroid, webapps or side-load the "full" unfiltered client but the experience for the normies would be that paid app experience. And I say paid app to avoid the pitfall that is advertising fed results.

> There's no reason a private/paid service addon to a client can't work for filtering.

There should be no reason why a service can't provide that feature natively.

Cost.

> Client-side filtering requires awareness of client-side filtering. How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ?

Facebook[1] and Reddit[2] both have a block user feature. It's a very rudimentary version of the killfile that usenet clients have. If users didn't want features like that, then they wouldn't be available on either platform.

> client-side filtering fails against organized harassment.

Usenet killfiles were advanced enough that you could easily filter out messages even from organized campaigns. For example, filtering it based on a number of conditions such as group header, from header, a unique header, certain keywords in the body, etc.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/168009843260943

[2] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/214548323-H...

Moderation isn't only about removing bad content, it's about removing content that's not necessarily bad but is unwanted. /r/gaming and /r/games are entirely different subreddits, with different content focuses and different communities because of their moderation. If I really wanted junk food content consumption I can go to /r/gaming. If I want to see news about video games I can go to /r/games. How do you accomplish that with client side filtering? /r/games has Indie Sunday where developers can post their own games on Sunday without competition from news about the massive AAA games everyone's already heard of. How do you accomplish that with client side filtering?

Good point. The majority of my Usenet memories revolve around meta discussions. What is and what is not supposed to be posted. Mid 2000s and people still had flamewars about whether a four line signature was to heavy.

Most meta discussions (beyond the basic etiquette and moderation, which were mostly worked out in the 1980s already) don't have objective answers, just subjective preferences. The solution is to keep aggressively iterating on splitting subreddits/communities/categories of users, until quality interaction is maximized. Obvious example: one category of user wants to discuss politics via memes, another category wants to discuss in long-form essays, another in threaded discussions, Canadians want to discuss Canadian politics without being flooded with US stuff, and plenty of others not at all i.e. they want any political posts off-topic and banned. The obvious way to keep all these groups maximally happy is to split into different groups.

Corporate/algorithmic moderation is almost entirely about removing "bad" content. You're talking about community moderation, which works exactly the same in decentralized systems.

> the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as anti-piracy.)

I thought this was due to the deal[1] that Andrew Cuomo (New York's attorney general at the time) made with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography. Many major ISPs discontinued their usenet service in that time period.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general...

The old chestnut "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" referred specifically to USENET if I recall correctly; it is often mis-applied to the Internet itself or to other services. But it referred to the notion that since USENET servers just routed their stash of stories to any node that requested them, censorship was functionally a non-starter; if you (the node owner) wanted content that some other node owner was squelching, you could request it from another node.

But it turns out that model had some major flaws. Nowadays, one could say the 'net interprets lack of censorship as offensive and migrates away from it. If there's one thing the experiments after USENET (from Slashdot to Mastodon) suggest, it's that people on average want some control (and don't on average want the burden of being their own moderator for every damn bitstream that comes down the pipe).

The net interprets hate as noise and filters it out.

At least, that's the goal.

Interested to see if we find these negatives paralleled in the fediverse.

Relevant: The ecosystem is moving (Challenges for distributed and decentralized technology from the perspective of Signal development)

https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving