Post by PanchoPost by Farmer GilesI did write a long reply to this - agreeing with you of course - but it
seems to have disappeared. TB is totally screwedup these days.
+1, It certainly is.
I'm getting better results by setting it to work offline. But it
complicates things, and it still occasionally refuses to send, and/or
loses posts.
Usenet is getting shitter and shitter, but there doesn't seem to be a
reasonable alternative. I keep hoping someone will develop a p2p
distributed system like BitTorrent, but I guess there is no money in it.
And you would need a filter mechanism to stop governments flooding it
with Peeler style posts.
Usenet was created in the days when the Internet had just become free.
Like most of the protocols of the time, it was developed for use by academic
institutions. Not long after the year 2000, the focus of the Internet
shifted towards commerce. In those days, there was still no Big Tech
presence on-line and Social Media was in its proto phase.
What makes Usenet free is that it is distributed. No one owns it. That
spirit of free cooperation has all but disappeared.
A p2p distributed system would be easy to design. Each client is also a
server and there is your network for distributing messages. It wouldn't
be difficult to "monetise" it either. The problem is, the authorities
don't like freedom of speech, and that includes Big Tech. They know
what a threat we could be to the system if we were able to communicate,
spread ideas and organise. Thus you can guarantee that any new p2p
system would quickly disappear from app stores and the average Internet
user is not "tech savvy" enough to break out of the ecosystem they use.
(Previously, they had to be.)