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Re: Federated, decentralised communication on the internet



On 3/21/18 7:57 PM, Dan Purgert wrote:

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.

I'm not sure "intended" is the right word either.  I think it was more a matter of scaling and membership management, and perhaps traffic management.  Mailing lists get really unwieldy as membership grows.  Newsgroups scale rather well.

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra


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