Re: Can the SocialWeb save Google Groups? (or, at least do what it should do?)

Aaron wrote:

> If we can create a modified ActivityPub standard that deals with
> hierarchical comments and without the extras not in NNTP the specification
> but with ActivityStreams style syntax/semantics and do it in OWL it would
> be a good start.


Could you define the subset of AS* that is sufficient to implement NNTP?
Can you identify anything in NNTP that cannot be done with the existing AS*
specs?

bob wyman


On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 2:27 PM Aaron Gray <aaronngray@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Mar 2023 at 21:33, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:
>
>> As discussed on /.
>> <https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/08/172217/google-groups-has-been-left-to-die>,
>> yesterday, Andrew Helwer asked on his blog
>> <https://ahelwer.ca/post/2023-03-08-google-groups/>: *"Google Groups has
>> been left to die: Where should the formal methods community move?**"* He
>> suggests that Google Groups is in decline and that *"It’s clear we ran
>> afoul of the old lesson: don’t build communities for long-lasting FOSS
>> projects on proprietary infrastructure you don’t control."*
>>
>> It seems to me that the kind of discussion groups that started on USENET
>> and then eventually migrated over to Google Groups are, in fact, "social"
>> and thus might be usefully included within the scope of this group. (Even
>> though NNTP is an IETF RFC, not a W3C standard.) In fact, it appears that
>> one could construct a useful analog to these legacy systems using
>> ActivityStreams and ActivityPub -- but not the way they are implemented in
>> Mastodon or most other existing AS/AP systems. It is also quite clear that
>> using a Federated approach to maintain this kind of discussion might
>> protect them from the catastrophic loss that arises when a proprietary
>> system decides to change its priorities.
>>
>> Is a future for USENET/Google Groups-like social interactions
>> appropriately discussed here? Can or should the SocialWeb provide a new,
>> more persistent, home for Helwer's Format Methods Community?
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>>
> I love the idea of restoring NNTP to its former glory, all we need is
> Bayesian filtering and proper moderation to deal with the SPAM issues that
> near enough killed it before google took it on and flattened its context.
>
> If we can create a modified ActivityPub standard that deals with
> hierarchical comments and without the extras not in NNTP the specification
> but with ActivityStreams style syntax/semantics and do it in OWL it would
> be a good start.
>
> Regards,
>
> Aaron
> --
> Aaron Gray
>
> Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher,
> Information Theorist, and Computer Scientist.
>
>