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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Fidonet boards exchanged messages overnight so the propagation delay was much longer. Also, the topology was different. I don't think the idea of each user publishing a public stream of messages that others subscribe to was a thing back then? Instead you would post messages in forums.

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I was replying to a post claiming the only novel part of mastodon compared to old message boards is federation. I’m merely pointing out that many old message boards did have federation.

To your points (1) yes, everything was slower back then (2) people could and did post streams of their work within the BBS framework, everything from multi-part posts to “owning” a message-board topic, to text/ansi e-zines, but back then the focus was much more on following topics than people.

At this point, the Usenet servers which took massive amounts of bandwidth and disk space take tiny amounts of bandwidth and disk space (assuming you don't allow binary posts).

Maybe it's time for Usenet to come back.

- Truly federated

- Topic focus instead of people-focus

- Killfiles!

- Proper threading

- Standards-based servers and clients

Usenet over UUCP worked just fine, with UUCP serving up email too on the dial-up batch syncs.

I really like NNTP, but spam was becoming a huge problem in the Usenet and its nature makes it harder to assert the identity of a poster.

I mean, if people want to give out helpful information about gland enlargement alongside links to where supplements can be purchased for the astonishingly low price of $12 a pill, who are we to try to stop them? Provide an unfiltered free speech platform and the stronger ideas will win, right?

Just provide more effective tools allowing users to tune their own feeds.

With a profit or ideological motive, I can spam you, and shout over all meaningful communication much faster than you can block me.

Yeah, and the idea of a spam filter won.

Spam filters can be opt-in. Spam filters can be federated. Spam filters can be local. It simply isn't true that decentralized censorship resistant systems fundamentally require users to be inundated with spam.

I wish that were the case.

> Killfiles!

Ah yes, censorship rears its ghastly head again. Or, what a quaint approach to spam.

As I recall, killfiles couldn't keep up with the glut of spam that happened.

The charitable explanation is that you don't know what a killfile is. It is a personally created and maintained list of subject lines and/or poster addresses that you don't want to see. They can be limited to specific groups or be universal; they can be used to remove entire threads or just the messages that match.

In other words, it's a personal filter on incoming information. It's Joo Janta Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses. If it is censorship, it is a censor who works for you, obeys your commands, and never imposes your opinions on anyone else.

And it's not particularly good for spam, nor does anyone think that is its purpose. A killfile works against persistent trolls and idiots.

> yes, everything was slower back then

Right, and still I was super amazed that I could send a message to someone halfway around the world, and it would arrive there only a couple of days later! Compared to a letter that's really fast!

It was cool stuff, for sure, and I'm glad I got to experience it when it was new. A little extra latency in our online discourse would probably do the modern world some good, not that anyone would go for it.

I've been mulling a "slow conversation platform" but so far my ideas aren't any more novel than Wikipedia with edit delays which just isn't compelling

I've been kicking some ideas around. My favourite so far is that instead of posting immediately, the system comes back to you after half an hour and says "do you still want to post this?". Hopefully any emotion has had a chance to work itself out in the half hour.

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