Re: Federated, decentralised communication on the internet

[Dan Purgert <dan@djph.net>]

Miles Fidelman wrote:
> On 3/21/18 5:25 PM, Richard Owlett wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>> I'm a consumer not a provider, but I understood that "control 
>> membership" was part of structure for a "moderated group".
>> Education cheerfully accepted ;}
>>
>>
> Not really.  Moderated meant that posts were filtered through one or 
> more moderators for approval.  Now that provided (provides) some degree 
> of control over who can post, it says nothing about who can read 
> messages (account on a machine that subscribes to the newsgroup).  It's 
> possible to rigidly control the machines that receive messages, and 
> potentially control accounts on those machines - but that's a 
> hard-to-implement approach.  Now, if traffic were encrypted, and there 
> was an out-of-band key management system (e.g., something like Kerberos 
> or OAuth) - one could then apply global restrictions on who could 
> actually read traffic sent to a particular newsgroup.

It has always been my understanding that "newsgroups" were somewhat
intended to be publicly readable -- i.e. "this is the current news".

Mailing lists, on the other hand were the ones that were somewhat more
(semi-)private discourse.

I'm not really sure "intended" is the right choice of word here though.
I mean, reality tends to distort "a creator's intent" pretty well.

-- 
|_|O|_| Registered Linux user #585947
|_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert
|O|O|O| PGP: 05CA 9A50 3F2E 1335 4DC5  4AEE 8E11 DDF3 1279 A281