Re:The End of Gmane?
by digi_owl on Thursday July 28, 2016 @05:45PM
(#12183423)
I think a different issue was discoverability.
With web forums you fire a search term into a random crawler and it will likely barf up a url. With NNTP you had to configure the email client to point to the isp server, and then locate a relevant group for what you were interested in. And even then searching the whole archive was troublesome if not impossible.
I watched something similar play out with IRC. Once AJAX allowed random websites to offer chat services non-tech channels basically wasted away, as your random joe and jane just entered some url they were told, or read about in some glossy mag, and presto.
As for reinventing NNTP, i don't think there is any incentive any longer. Especially now that something as big as Reddit can just pay Amazon to scale the back end as large as they need.
Store and forward came to be before the net, and was used during the early net, because of narrow bandwidth.
With web forums you fire a search term into a random crawler and it will likely barf up a url. With NNTP you had to configure the email client to point to the isp server, and then locate a relevant group for what you were interested in. And even then searching the whole archive was troublesome if not impossible.
I watched something similar play out with IRC. Once AJAX allowed random websites to offer chat services non-tech channels basically wasted away, as your random joe and jane just entered some url they were told, or read about in some glossy mag, and presto.
As for reinventing NNTP, i don't think there is any incentive any longer. Especially now that something as big as Reddit can just pay Amazon to scale the back end as large as they need.
Store and forward came to be before the net, and was used during the early net, because of narrow bandwidth.