I love long summer evenings. It’s nearly ten o’clock and there’s still some light out there and the blackbirds are singing.
@wandererbill, @randomwizard, @frotz, @tomasino and I are having a great discussion about how we prep for our games.
If you’d like an account, contact me or join Cosmic Voyage. There are currently two news servers carrying the “campaignwiki.talk” newsgroup.
It’s a bit like a test balloon to see if it would work as Reddit alternative. Not that I’ve been a big Reddit user. I’m betting on Lemmy, to be honest. But we’ll see.
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon. – What Reddit Got Wrong, by Rory Mir, for the EFF
What Reddit Got Wrong, by Rory Mir, for the EFF
I’d love for net news to make a comeback!
Usenet, USENET, or “in full”, User’s Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system … Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. … A major difference between a BBS or web message board and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator or hosting provider. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing set of news servers that store and forward messages to one another … Individual users may read messages from and post to a local (or simply preferred) news server, which can be operated by anyone, and those posts will automatically be forwarded to any other news servers peered with the local one, while the local server will receive any news its peers have that it currently lacks. This results in the automatic proliferation of content posted by any user on any server to any other user subscribed to the same newsgroups on other servers. – Usenet, on Wikipedia
Clearly, moderation and tools to support moderators are still a problem. But perhaps, as a second Usenet grows, such tools could be developed. I’m feeling pretty good about it, in any case.
#RPG #News
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If you wanted to get started, I’d suggest a three step process: first, just install the news web front-end and point it at my news server. Next, install a “leaf” news server like sn and create local copies of groups on my server. Point the news web front-end at your own news server and verify it all works. Finally, if you want real peering, uninstall sn and install a full blown news server like INN. Talk with fellow news admins about peering. 🤝
Let me know if you’re interested. 😄
– Alex 2023-06-14 21:51 UTC
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I started a write-up: Peering. I’d love to hear from you if you tried it.
– Alex 2023-06-15 06:39 UTC
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In late June, sun sets at half past 10 in Western Spain, where I’m from (and currently live in). You should visit it some day 🙂
– Enzo 2023-06-15 18:38 UTC
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Yeah, I totally should! 😄 I’m afraid that when I travel that far there’s always the pull to visit family in Portugal, though. The last time I’ve been to Galicia, for example, was when I was 18…
– Alex 2023-06-15 19:49 UTC