On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:24:51PM +0100, Mark Rousell wrote:
If you have a bunch of users on remote SMTP and NNTP servers then it's always a wash. (MUAs don't typically download the entire message body unless asked to, just as news readers don't typically download the entire message body unless asked to.) Basically, the efficiency argument is bogus. I can only say that I disagree that the bandwidth efficiency is bogus overall. If by "remote [...] NNTP servers" you mean other NNTP servers that are federated with your own, then this is surely a bandwidth saving compared to email. I.e. The data only needs to be sent once to the remote NNTP servers for local distribution to users who connect to those servers, thus reducing bandwidth usage overall.
No, because the idea of having ISPs set up NNTP transit servers for individual small discussion groups is...unlikely at best. You've already stipulated that you don't want to talk about usenet, so stop talking about 'a generic architecture of NNTP transit servers that isn't usenet but is still open to arbitrary groups and users but doesn't have any of the problems of usenet because it's carefully controlled and thus doesn't have abuse issues but isn't prohibitively resource intensive and people will set up serves and join the network because nobody likes stupid old HTTP anyway' and instead start talking about something that's likely to be implemented: centralized NNTP gateways to the services most people will use via SMTP or HTTP, with NNTP client access to the gateway. You might see people create private transit servers for local access, but the number of clients using such servers instead of the primary one would suggest de minimis bandwidth savings. If anything, the private transit servers would end up like most private debian archive mirrors and consume more bandwidth than they save (because most of the transferred files never get used). And in this model, any putative "transfer efficiency of NNTP" is simply not compelling.
I know you know this but I'll say it anyway: REST isn't a single protocol, it's just a type of protocol. There are loads of REST-based protocols around. Which one do you choose? There are no standardised REST protocols for message distribution that I am aware of. There's nothing REST-based that is like SMTP, or POP3, or IMAP, or NNTP, or anything else that has broad client support across a range of device types in this context.
It's so incredibly uncommon to find a REST based discussion forum that doesn't come with its own HTML UI that I don't consider it worth considering. So the "broad client support" in question would be a web browser and that basically includes everything. Welcome to the 21st century! Then, if your content is compelling enough, people will use whatever wacky REST API they need to get your content if they want to go beyond the HTML UI. I'd guess that the number of people using google APIs (for example) today, whether knowingly or unknowingly, exceeds the total number of people that ever used NNTP, even if those people just don't understand how things would be better if they were using NNTP instead. If you meant to talk only about dedicated protocol-specific thick clients, then yeah, there probably aren't as many for specific web forums as there are clients for SMTP, POP3, IMAP, or NNTP. But most people don't really care. (Yes, I've gathered by this point that your number one requirement is the ability to use an NNTP client--I'm referring to the other people.)
hopefully inoffensive manner.
Sorry, no. But anyway, I get that you really really like NNTP. Have fun, don't expect a lot of converts.