Re: uunet ends newsfeed/newsreader in US

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 03:55:14PM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
> Because NNTP is still alive and kicking.

Of course it is.  Usenet is *still* the best experiment ever run in
the area of scalable, distributed forums, which I think is a tribute
to the vision of its originators (and to the architects of NNTP).
Newsgroups share a number of significant advantages with mailing lists --
not surprising, given their lineage and the observation that mailing lists
have been unidirectionally or bidirectionally gatewayed with newsgroups
for decades.

1. They're asynchronous: you don't have to interact in real time.
        You can download messages when connected to the 'net, then read
        them and compose responses when offline. 
2. They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple outages
        and severe congestion.
3. They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.  Web forums
        and social sites require that you go fishing for it.
4. They scale beautifully.
5. They allow you to use YOUR software with the user interface of YOUR
        choosing rather than being compelled to learn 687 different
        web forums with 687 different user interfaces, all of which
        range from "merely bad" to "hideously bad".
6. You can archive them locally...
7. ...which means you can search them locally with the software of YOUR
        choice.  Including when you're offline.  And provided you make
        backups, you'll always have that archive.
8. They're portable: lists and newsgroups can be rehosted relatively easily.
9. (When properly run) they're relatively free of abuse vectors.
10. They're low-bandwidth, which is especially important at a point in
        time when many people are interacting via metered services that
        charge by the byte.  (Obviously I'm talking about text-only
        newsgroups in this point -- of course I am, they're the most
        important ones.)

And so on.

---rsk