Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
by dredmorbius on Friday November 15, 2019 @05:44PM
(#21549507)
It's been tried, numerous times.
Usenet still exists. Outside very small pools, it's dead, or a spam wasteland.
Peter da Silva, an early heavy user (the first and fourth most prolific poster one month in the late 1980s / early 1990s, according to a reply he made to me at G+), created, and still runs, Usenet II. Which is also a wasteland.
The client-independence is a benefit only up to a certain degree. Consistent characterset (8-bit ASCII largely), no binaries / multimedia (uuencoded excepted), and consistent forms of address and reply (mostly), kept things sane.
But even between the tin/rtin and emacs newsreader camp, quoting styles differed. I don't recall if it was @gumby or others (and I'm positive one case was someone else, involved in xemacs development), but even one emacs-variant style of reply-quoting turned disruptive when trying to nest multiple levels deep.
("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Don't do that then.")
These aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles to be mounted. On which deciding is likely the hardest part.
Usenet still exists. Outside very small pools, it's dead, or a spam wasteland.
Peter da Silva, an early heavy user (the first and fourth most prolific poster one month in the late 1980s / early 1990s, according to a reply he made to me at G+), created, and still runs, Usenet II. Which is also a wasteland.
The client-independence is a benefit only up to a certain degree. Consistent characterset (8-bit ASCII largely), no binaries / multimedia (uuencoded excepted), and consistent forms of address and reply (mostly), kept things sane.
But even between the tin/rtin and emacs newsreader camp, quoting styles differed. I don't recall if it was @gumby or others (and I'm positive one case was someone else, involved in xemacs development), but even one emacs-variant style of reply-quoting turned disruptive when trying to nest multiple levels deep.
("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Don't do that then.")
These aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles to be mounted. On which deciding is likely the hardest part.