Re: lamers on IRC

[Thomas Lord]

The wikipedia article looks at first glance to document the
alt groups correctly, as far as I recall.

The key thing to alts:  no central moderator, yes, but also
every individual host operator had the capacity to simply
not carry some.  Every user had a theoretical capacity
to operate their own host or to shop around for one who
carried the alt groups they preferred.   Of course, the whole
thing being P2P, hosts upstream of a given host could
choose to shun it and hosts could shop around for their
choice of upstream hosts.

Google used its economic power and social influence to first
centralize what was left of mainstream netnews and then to
kill it off.

I dream of a world with a few very popular hosts and lots of
tangles and tentacles of more "semi-privateish" hosts with
groups that aren't big loud public broadcasts, more or less.

-t


On 2022-05-27 21:21, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Thomas Lord wrote:
>
> > I wish something like this existed but with the
> > groups/moderator features (suitably updated) of
> > Usenet netnews.
>
> Weren't there parallel hierarchies, one of which was moderated
> and the other not so? Was that the "alt" thing? This was
> before my time ...
>
> Because then on IRC one could have
>
> #emacs
> #emacs-lamers
>
> LOL