Also, the old NNTP and email lists are still alive.
I use SLRN on batch mode on Usenet and tildex (Unix based micronetworks), and it rocks. In batch mode, I pull down all the comments/articles and I push down the answers and written articles. No need to be online 24h/7d.
For email, i use Getmail against an IMAP server.
Thus, I can fetch all the data offline at once with a 'do_the_internet.sh' script in a breeze.
I would love to use HN over NNTP.
How would you represent upvotes and ranking over NNTP, or would you just drop that for comments altogether?
(I'm asking because I've been thinking of implementing something exactly like this, with NNCP also maybe, but the ranking is what I'm not sure on.)
> tildex (Unix based micronetworks)
Ooh what are these tildexes?
While I know everyone likes to hate on Lotus Notes here, once of it's key architecture features was that it assumed a seldom-connected and replicated data model - the clients and servers would contact each other at intervals to get updates, and otherwise everything was local.
Decades later, I still miss this functionality a lot - just force and update/replicate before you go somewhere (either office-home or a trip across the world), and everything is the same. No worries about connectivity quality; if it was choppy, just give it more time to handle the retries/ecc, and get the good updates. (of course, many system managers/admins/devs didn't really consider that much of a feature and treated it like any other network app, so not taking advantage of it, but those who understood it's power...)
I really wish others would think in such a seldom-connected model, as the network is becoming increasingly brittle, and working in that model was such a joy.