Somewhat along the same lines....
Russ Allbery
I just spun up two more full Usenet feeds today, to two other
universities. Looking at my news statistics, an interesting pattern is
emerging. I have the peering of a Freenix top 50 site, feeds from four of
the top ten sites, and I'm not really interested in more large feeds like
that. But if some private individual or organization who wants a trimmed
newsfeed so that they can participate in Usenet, I'd try to help them
however I could.
I filter spam on my transit server, unlike most of the transit servers out
there. If it's crap, I don't want to propagate it. That means that if
someone sits downstream from me, they get a strongly spam-reduced feed
without having to have the horsepower to do it themselves.
I'll put my box in the middle of the torrent and do the work to reduce the
flow enough that a small site running C News can take the news that they
really want. I'll put 25 line patterns in newsfeeds to customize the feed
for them. I have a lot of peers who have acceptance rates of 80% or
higher, some of which don't ever feed any articles back. Or maybe one or
two a day, tops. But they treat Usenet as something that they want to
participate in, not just carry because it's expected.
I try to do my part to keep the small sites connected and on the net. And
the above article is a lot of the reason why. Because of my ideal of
Usenet. Because Usenet is all about the individual posters, and if a feed
brings one more participant into our collective conversation, that's more
important than all the Freenix stats and reciprocal peering in the world.
This is what will prevent, in the long term, the sorts of things jwz is
talking about in the above article from happening. The overall picture
isn't always clear, but I think this is important. Deeply, fundamentally
important. Even when people don't use the resource constructively. Or
maybe especially then.
I know I'm preaching to the choir. I can tell from the Path lines. But
sometimes it's good to know that the people listening know just what you
mean and how you feel.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Jim Kingdon
While I more or less agree with the thrust of this article (in terms
of what the net should be), I think it kind of misses a few points:
* AOL's efforts at making it a G-rated service (if indeed that's what
they are) are not all that effective. There are plenty of X-rated
spam, chat rooms, and other stuff on AOL. AOL's content regulators
look more like keystone kops than feared censors to me.
* I'm much more optimistic in the sense that I don't see the nonprofit
or hobby or individual-centered parts of the net going the way of
the independent bookstore (in fact, Amazon has broadened choices in
books but I digress). I think that heroes like Russ Allbery (he
posts about his efforts running a newsserver but he contributes to
the net in all kinds of ways) will be around as long as there is a
need for them. Many of the commercial services are a Good Thing
too, partly because they don't rely on heroism quite the same way
(yes, even AOL, I have lots of friends who are happy with it even if
they can't send me email because I've blocked mail from AOL to cut
down on spam). Now, much of what I say here is the same issue we
were discussing days ago with Todd and others, about whether
bandwidth was getting cheaper fast enough to keep up with increases
in readership and so on, so perhaps there is no need to re-hash that
whole thing...