💾 Archived View for thrig.me › tech › gemini › nntp.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 17:22:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Assuming no bitrot, NNTP postings to comp.infosystems.gemini can be accessed at
gemini://gemini.bunburya.eu/newsgroups/gemini/messages/
otherwise, there are freely accessible NNTP servers, such as nntp.aioe.org
which can be read using a NNTP client such as slrn or tin or trn; on OpenBSD the /usr/ports/news directory will list more. Other clients include Alpine, doing something under emacs, writing your own client, etc.
if you are in a hurry and are on OpenBSD (or can use a similar package or ports system command) and do not mind the lack of encryption
$ doas pkg_add tin
$ NNTPSERVER=nntp.aioe.org tin -r
then from the group selection menu "g" then "comp.infosystems.gemini", enter into that.
otherwise, for offline reading slrnpull may be of use
$ doas pkg_add slrn
$ mkdir -p ~/var/spool/news
$ echo 'comp.infosystems.gemini 0 0' >> ~/var/spool/news/slrnpull.conf
$ slrnpull -d ~/var/spool/news -h snews://nntp.aioe.org:563
and then you can read from that spool directory with a suitably configured client (this may take some work, depending on the client), or even less(1) or view(1) or whatever because it is all just text files.
$ cat > ~/.slrnrc <<EOF
set server_object "spool"
set spool_root "$HOME/var/spool/news"
EOF
$ slrn -f ~/.jnewsrc --create
...
$ cat ~/var/spool/news/news/comp/infosystems/gemini/315
...
as for sending a message to the newsgroup, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
otherwise, there may be systems that allow access to NNTP, e.g. sdf.org but these may cost some amount of money:
I'm using slrn via sdf. They used to have usenet access for all users,
but sadly that went down about a year ago, and now only subscription
"MetaARPA" users have access. So this isn't really a method to
recommend to someone just wanting usenet access.
otherwise, Google did something with Usenet but at one point that was behind an iron curtain of JavaScript; I checked just now (October 13 2022) using the w3m browser and it did not seem very usable. Maybe it might work out in some other browser?
is rumored to support JavaScript and to be very command line so I probably should check it out one of these days. However, if a site looks bad in w3m that most likely means that it is not worth my time. This is not a new sentiment:
Why I don't use Netscape
No, not because I use MSIE. I actually use x-mosaic 2.7b5 (ancient) with delayed image loading and emacs-w3 2.2.26 (text-only, and there certainly are more recent versions). By default, these browsers don't display images, they have problems with tables, cannot do frames or any other fancy features.
But these browsers have one great feature: They give a very good indication whether a page is worth reading. If these browsers don't display anything, or the display looks shitty, there usually is not much content, either (In a few cases I looked up the page with something more advanced (e.g., Arena), and I was always disappointed).
https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-ancient-browsers.html
One could also write their own NNTP client or server software, which might be a good exercise in programming. Or one might start (or support) a new protocol in the same space?