free collaborative tools for low BW and losy connections

Mon Mar 30 11:30:16 UTC 2020

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 04:18:51PM -0700, Michael Thomas wrote:
> 
> On 3/29/20 1:46 PM, Joe Greco wrote:
> >On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 07:46:28PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> >>Joe Greco wrote on 29/03/2020 15:56:
> >>
> >>The concept of flooding isn't problematic by itself.
> >>Flood often works fine until you attempt to scale it.  Then it breaks,
> >>just like Bj??rn admitted. Flooding is inherently problematic at scale.
> >For... what, exactly?  General Usenet?  Perhaps, but mainly because you
> >do not have a mutual agreement on traffic levels and a bunch of other
> >factors.  Flooding works just fine within private hierarchies, and since
> >I thought this was a discussion of "free collaborative tools" rather than
> >"random newbie trying to masochistically keep up with a full backbone
> >Usenet feed", it definitely should work fine for a private hierarchy and
> >collaborative use.
> 
> AFAIK, Usenet didn't die because it wasn't scalable. It died because 
> people figured out how to make it a business model.

Not at all.  I can see why you say that, but it isn't the reality, any
more than commercial uses killed the Internet when it was opened up to
people who made it a business model.

The introduction of the DMCA ratcheted up the potential for enforcement
and penalties against end users doing Napster, bittorrent, illicit web
and FTP, or whatever your other favorite form of digital piracy might
happen to have been back in the '90's.

The CDA 230 protection for providers allowed Usenet to be served without
significant concern.  

So pirates had a safe model where they could distribute pirated traffic,
posting it somewhere "safe" and then it would be available everywhere,
and it was HARD to get it taken down.

This, along with legitimate binaries traffic increases, caused an 
explosion in traffic, which made Usenet increasingly impractical for 
ISP's to self-host.  The problem is that it scaled far too well as a 
binary traffic distribution system.  As this happened, most ISP's 
outsourced to Usenet service providers, and end users often picked up 
"premium" Usenet services from such providers directly as well.

I do not see the people who made it a business model as responsible
for the state of affairs.  Had commercial USP's not stepped up, Usenet
probably would have died off in the late 90's-early 2000's as ISP's
dropped support.  They (and I have to include myself as I run a Usenet
company) are arguably the ones who kept it going.  Demand was there.

The users who are dumping binaries on Usenet are helping to kill it.

Actual text traffic has been slowly dying off for years as webforums
have matured and become a better choice of technology for nontechnical
end users on high speed Internet connections.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way
through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that
democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"-Asimov