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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse.

For the most part, when people talk about "The Fediverse" they mean ActivityPub based sites. You could argue the point, since NNTP is "federated" as well, and one could certainly conceive of federating between the NNTP space and the ActivityPub space.

I'm a Fediverse user, fan, and advocate (mindcrime@fosstodon.org), but I specifically mentioned Usenet, because the "thing I want" in this context is, in fact, Usenet. Now if somebody wants to do the work to rebuild the Usenet hierarchy on top of the "wild west" that is the litany of servers on the Fediverse, build client support into Thunderbird, etc., then sure... that could probably turn into something interesting.

You wouldn't have liked Usenet in its heyday

Please don't presume to tell me what I would or wouldn't like. That's incredibly disrespectful. And in point of fact, I did like Usenet in its heyday.

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It's been a while but I don't recall a ton of politics on the usenet groups I used to participate in (mostly tech subjects). Of course there were groups for politics, and sometimes a thread would go off on a tangent, but the nice thing about usenet is it was easy to killfile people or threads that you didn't want to read anymore.

When I used it it seemed like it was mostly real names (.edu accounts) at least on the groups I read, so maybe that kept people in check a bit. Though that would have been easy to spoof I'm sure.

My department also had some local groups that did not propagate. So it must be possible to stand up your own NNTP server and have groups for your local users that are at least in that sense "private"

The user was talking about internal group politics/drama. Not national electoral politics.

Usenet was sorted by topic. Same people stick to the required topic in different forums.In the fediverse, you follow people, and therefore can't control very well what people post about. I follow some people because I am interested in technical topics, but I end muting some of those because some are very political, and I am not interested in some of these topics.

I don't think the Usenet model can be replicated on top of Fediverse. Not everyone sees instances as a topic thing (I host my own instance).

Hm. Wonder if any newsreaders could "follow" a person, regardless of the group he posted in. I don't recall that feature existing in rn or trn.

Lemmy is also built on ActivityPub as part of the Fediverse and is arranged into topics (called communities). E.g. you can follow retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org (or web interface https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/retrocomputing) and only see retrocomputing posts.

Since it's all ActivityPub, you can follow Lemmy communities from a Mastodon client but the UX in that case is pretty bad (e.g. Mastodon servers won't backfill posts so you won't see any history).

I’ve been very happy on the Fediverse (mastodon) since I took the plunge a few months ago. This is what the “early” internet at its best must have felt like. Real humans, technical discussions, random finds (painting!), sorted by created at desc.

> sorted by created at desc

Interestingly, this seems to be amongst the most controversial aspects; some people _hate_ it.

Personally, I was only quite dimly aware that Twitter had an algorithm now, like a common Facebook; until Musk ruined it I generally only really used Twitter via Tweetbot, so was getting a time-based feed anyway. So Mastodon was just what I was used to anyway. But more people than I expected actually liked the Twitter algorithm, and couldn't cope with Mastodon's lack of magic ML stuff at all.

Same. It's a bit "random" though. Maybe because the Mastodon world has generally resisted having good global search. And even though certain instances have broad topics (like sigmoid.social for AI/ML, or fosstodon.org for F/OSS) a feed tends to quickly fill up with plenty of random stuff.

With Usenet, if you join, say, comp.ai, you know that (spam aside) you're just getting AI stuff. Same for comp.linux, comp.lang.c++, or whatever. There's something to be said for the topic hierarchy there.

I see a place for both ActivityPub and Usenet, personally. Although, again, acknowledging that somebody could probably in principle build the Usenet style experience on top of ActivityPub. But as far as I know, that part doesn't exist today. If it does, somebody please let me know.

For forums over ActivityPub, there's Lemmy.

It's not really like usenet, if only because of the character limits. This really changes the nature of the discussion.

Yes, having images available within mastodon is nice - that was always clunky with usenet.

I’m on infosec.exchange, our limit is 11000 chars. That’s more than enough.

My understanding is that "typical" Mastodon/ActivityPub instances limit you to on the order of 500. Certainly true for Fosstodon.

I never used the Fediverse, but is all/most trying to be a Twitter clone?

Mastodon is like that. Then you have Kbin and Lemmy which are more Reddit-like, and Pixelfed which is supposedly similar to Instagram.

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