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Re: "So I Read the Netnews Specs"
Love this idea! Then again, I'm still reading newsgroups in spite of it being flooded with spam.
I'm wondering if the thread support can be defined around the subject line. Hashing the message you're threading from. There should be a simple solution to making the huge nest of newsgroups that both support misfin but also can be more feature rich with a smarter client.
I also like the idea that the system would be misfin compatible while also being independent. This would mean we can use mifin clients while not making normal misfin protocol support threading. Make diving into the nested monster of threaded conversations an opt-in by actively choosing the service. Some newsgroups threads end up nothing but branches
Oct 15 · 2 months ago
🚀 clseibold [OP] · Oct 15 at 19:51:
@jecxjo Thanks. I plan on starting the first Newsfin "group" today, which I think will be called "meta.announcements" (where "meta." will become the hierarchy for any topic about newsfin itself). Objections or alternative ideas are welcome!
As for threading: my initial thoughts were that having the same subject should be fine enough to create a thread, and I'm not completely sure if we need threads that branch off each other. However, we *could* do branches via your method by placing a hash in a subject line. The hash would be of the original sender and timestamp of the first message of the thread you are branching from, perhaps. Idk.
We don't have to extend regular misfin to add simple threading if we just assume all messages of the same subject are part of the same thread. If we want branching off, that also wouldn't require any extension to misfin if we used the hash in the subject line method above. If we want something more advanced, then there are other ways like adding an identifier in the message body itself, or I guess we could introduce a different more advanced protocol that interoperates with misfin (although, I feel like this shouldn't be necessary).
i think i misunderstood your previous post about threading. if all you were looking for was "group by subject and time" then yeah that's a no brainer. I thought by threading you meant the whole big tree of replies to replies.
Excited for the first... newsgroup? to be created.
🚀 clseibold [OP] · Oct 15 at 23:06:
@jecxjo Yeah, the previous post's threading was different, because it wasn't for mailinglists/newsgroups, it was for an end-user's mailbox. From the perspective of a mailinglist, because everyone can pretty much see or access every thread, it is assumed that the use of the same subject all goes to the same thread.
From the perspective of an end-user's mailbox, you might have overlapping subjects from different people, and you don't want those mails to be put into the same threads. That's why you take into account the participants in the conversation as well. Replies and sub-threads were not really considerations in any of the threading that I was picturing or talking about.
Anyways, I'm going to get the newsfin group setup soon. I think I'm going to name it "newsfin.announce" though. Since this system is using misfin addresses for each newsfin group, I don't want to pick names that could conflict with common misfin address names on pubnix servers, etc.
@clseibold let’s get GMAP wrappped up!
So I Read the Netnews Specs — Two things in the internet world have always fascinated me: newsgroups and mailinglists. I didn't grow up in the BBS world of the 1990s, but the idea of distributed messaging among multiple different hosts led me to experiment with a lot of different federated/distributed protocols and networks. Mailinglists, on the other hand, take an already ubiquitous network, email, that is not nearly as held down by binary sharing, copyright infringements, illegal activity,...