I see the topology as very USENet like.

Not that this is a bad thing. There's still life in USENet, and a fair few people still sit and discuss things in various groups (if you know where to look)[1]. The backbone concept of USENet is still great from a decentralised point of view - someone just needs to add some crypto layers to it (as a standard), and I reckon it could rise again like a phoenix.

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[1] I'm deliberately and totally ignoring the large elephant in the room with HDDs full of pirate software, media, and porn.

If you make a decentralized, encrypted, potentially anonymous network some users will use it for bootlegs and probably worse. That doesn't preclude or outweigh all the legitimate uses.

History says otherwise. Usenet shows, in the ever growing ratio of binaries to non-binaries traffic from (roughly) the 1990s onwards, that in terms of the literal weight (i.e. the traffic volume) the uses that you talk about very much did outweigh the "legitimate" uses, by an order of magnitude at least.

And the history of Usenet also shows that people do think that the fact that something is mis-used should preclude any use of it. One can look to the history of how several organizations discontinued their Usenet services as a lesson for that, too.

Traffic volume for binaries is higher than that of text because the message size is larger. They are also often chunked into sub-messages that Usenet servers counted as individual messages but semantically are not. Many binaries are legitimate redistribution, although of course not all.

Do you mean to say that there are more binary messages than text messages by an order of magnitude before chunking and that none of those binaries were permitted copies under the law? Because I'm going to need to see evidence to be convinced of that.

Interesting question: "How avoidable is this outcome with or without Scuttlebutt?" In Cuba, USB sticks perform this function, distributing all kinds of media - but mostly movies - throughout society in the face of heavy censorship of every other connection. Admittedly, though, that still requires a kind of common consent. The "and probably worse" stuff couldn't be passed around this way; certainly not so easily as the latest Hollywood movies.

Not sure why this was donvoted. From a bird's eye view, the whole system looks remarkably similar to Usenet, especially in the old times of UUCP, back when systems were mostly offline and had relatively short timespans to exchange information (via dial-up connection or similar).

What's different now is that we have pleny of disk space, and more than enough computing power to perform proper cryptography.

Probably the same reason that "slack == irc" and anti-systemd comments get heavily downvoted. Younger generations want badly to believe that they've invented something completely novel and unique.

This absolutely is usenet + crypto.

The reason those comments get downvoted is because they are wrong. Anyone writing off slack as an IRC clone exhibits a very poor understanding of either system. Slack is similar to IRC in that they deliver text-based communication, but that's about it. The underlying protocols, features, and so forth are radically different.

Most anti-systemd comments are similarly poorly thought out and articulated.

This might be superficially usenet+crypto, but oftentimes things are more than the sum of their conceptual parents.

Indeed, that's what I find exciting about the idea. I'm not keen on the implementation, which is built on npm & JavaScript, nor the protocol, which is built on JSON, but those might be worth it if we can restore some of the glory which was mid-90s Usenet, with security, privacy and accountability.

Especially since the implementation details are not set in stone. Once the lower-level protocols start to stabilize, more efficient implementations will probably emerge.

Agreed. The resemblance to Usenet and email are what I find especially intriguing.

My thoughts too.