Reddit-NNTP: An RFC 3977 compliant NNTP server frontend for Reddit

[meff]

Hey all,

I've been working on https://github.com/Koshroy/reddit-nntp for some
time now and am happy to release it. Reddit-NNTP is an RFC 3977
compliant NNTP server which supports most of MODE READER. Reddit-NNTP
fetches posts from Reddit and stores them into a sqlite spool
database. Newsreaders or other newsservers can point directly at the
server to fetch groups and articles.

Feel free to give me feedback if any of you are interested in using my
implementation. It's written in Go and only doesn't use pure Go in
order to use sqlite. It should be simple to build and get running.

Thanks

[rek2 hispagatos]

Cool but I think is better to choose open/descentralized fediverse
platforms like lemmy, lemmy is a federated and libre reddit alike
network with thousands of users, reason I say this it follows the open
spirit of the early days and USENET.

--
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gemini://rek2.hispagatos.org
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https://hispagatos.space/@rek2

[meff]

On 2022-04-26, rek2 hispagatos <re...@hispagatos.org.invalid> wrote:
> Cool but I think is better to choose open/descentralized fediverse
> platforms like lemmy, lemmy is a federated and libre reddit alike
> network with thousands of users, reason I say this it follows the open
> spirit of the early days and USENET.

I'm not discounting the Fediverse, but Usenet isn't the same as the
Fediverse. Foremost, the Fediverse is a web system and Usenet is
not. The Fediverse is built around the semantics of HTTPS (and the
certificate and trust-system mechanics thereof), JSON, and web
requests. It sends messages over HTTPS requests and doesn't really
support store-and-forward modes the way newsservers do. Usenet also
has a very different culture of moderation and the moderator burden
frequently falls on the user and their kill/scorefile to moderate the
experience of Usenet (some may consider this to be a problem others a
positive.)

IMO the Fediverse is a different thing than Usenet. I've long thought
about bridging the two (building an AP relay to send over Usenet
articles) to see what that would look like. But Usenet can work as
long as two computers can exchange bytes. AP and the Fediverse needs a
lot more structure to work. Nothing against the Fediverse just that I
think there's room for both.

[Donaldson]

Interesting.

How does this compare against https://github.com/taviso/nntpit ? That's
the method I am currently using.

[meff]

On 2022-05-06, Donaldson <em...@email.com> wrote:
> Interesting.
>
> How does this compare against https://github.com/taviso/nntpit ? That's
> the method I am currently using.

Reddit-NNTP does a few things differently:

1. It fetches data from Reddit and stores it in a local spool. This
decouples news reading from article fetching.

2. nntpit is a bit more fast and loose with the RFCs. I've written
Reddit-NNTP to have good support for RFC 3977. It should be compatible
with a large number of newsreaders. I've been doing most of my testing
with slrn and Gnus. Reddit-NNTP lists subreddits/groups in its spool
with NEWGROUPS.

3. The reason I went with a local spool with Reddit-NNTP was to
generate consistent Article IDs. Your newsreader can remember what you
last read and only fetch new content.

4. Reddit-NNTP places its subreddits/groups under a hierarchy (by
default "reddit.") so it plays well with Leafnode. You can combine
Reddit-NNTP easily with a running Leafnode or other-newsserver install
and get it as part of your digest.

Let me know if you have any other questions.