@trevorflowers @SHODAN

Yes, we did have a lot of fun. patching in hardware, enhancing machine code, using things like the CONIX overlay to CP/M which gave limited (very limited) unix functionality. Setting up the first dial up public access internet site in Tassy. calvados.apana.org.au on an XT.

You will *never* have that much fun with IT/IS now.

#memories #uucp #HCF #CONIX #CPM

> See, because you need an always-on computer in order to really reliably use #decentralized social media
Bruh. #Usenet, #Fidonet and #UUCP (#UUCPnet) beg to differ (no reason you couldn't use #NNCP for Usenet now if #NNTP isn't your thing).

So do #SSB and #retroshare.

That criticism is pretty much specific to #ActivityPub as commonly implemented.

The #Fediverse is more than just ActivityPub and will outlive it.

Book:
"!%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks"
by Donnalyn Frey and Rick Adams (O'Reilly & Associates).

According to the Preface, it provides "up-to-date, concise information on electronic mail networks around the world".

We got both kinds of network: #UUCP and #Internet.

Much of the page count is taken up with "lists of many of the world's second- and third-level domains".

This makes it a useful hardcopy snapshot of which domain names were registered under the main TLDs.

@aprilfollies @pluralistic If you're actually interested in #sneakernet and #AsynchronousCommunication, you might find #NNCP interesting.

It's a renewed #UUCP essentially, with modern encryption & first-class support for portable storage as a transport (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Comparison.html).

@josephholsten @leadore I've had some conversations with a few people about #NNTP, #UUCP, and #Usenet, notably @vga256. But I am unaware of a #Lemmy #Usenet bridge. Do you have a link to an article or technical discussion about the bridge? That sounds awesome!

@pooserville Not really, the comparison to email was only ever a comparison.

Email never actually had this issue in a way that mattered until the idiotic tendency for assuming constant low-latency TCP-friendly connections fully set-in.

You can still send email over #floppies, #Fidonet, #UUCP and #NNCP just fine, by the way.

And you completely ignored my second post, which suggested several ways by which the design could've avoided reimplementing #SMTP but for social media.

@navi @bartavi #Email has a much better defined retry behavior in SMTP.

(Protocols dependent on successful low-latency TCP connections essentially don't qualify as supporting #AsynchronousCommunication, https://www.complete.org/asynchronous-communication/, email as commonly used does as noted there)

It is also simply not dependent on #SMTP in the first place, you can use #UUCP, #NNCP, #fidonet or a thumb drive (or floppy) with a spool just as well for it.

#ActivityPub as defined by the standard lacks that flexibility.

Compared to using #DavMail to access a #MicrosoftExchange server, using #Kermit to fetch my mail over a dialup line a quarter century ago was lightning fast.

A #UUCP interface to Exchange might be more appropriate…

@mint @roboneko @i2p @torproject @z3r0fox So new keys would also need extensions to the protocol for sharing.

Starts to be quite a few. It's weird to make a federation protocol in this day & age and not consider peering difficulties and inability to communicate directly (fuck, #Usenet does it better via #UUCP & #NNCP).

China isn't the only regime with a hard-on for censorship and utter disregard for the sanctity of networks after all. That should have been part of the design considerations.

@vga256 Would the creation of modern #UUCP tools help?

One of my design goals — which may differ from yours — is "federation by any means necessary" including off-grid newsgroups over ham radio with full support for posting via sneakernet.

I'm happy to share my UUCP code, once I've written it, if it will be useful to someone else. Taylor UUCP, the most commonly available UUCP package, is ancient being a mix of ANSI and K&R #C code, and has a TODO list a mile long.

@profoundlynerdy @dalias @blakereid Currently, as far as I know, there is a single implementation (and it seems to be implementation-defined).

#NNCP (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/, it has a few mirrors) is essentially a modernization of #UUCP with a few added features (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Comparison.html).

There's someone running a blog (https://www.complete.org/nncp/) with articles on various experiments they've done with it, which incidentally includes running an #NNTP gateway (https://www.complete.org/usenet-over-nncp/).

@Dianora

Does that mean old enough to have used those tools or to have had them operating at your birth?

For me this is the difference between being Lisp old or Lisp Machine old.

And while I am certainly UUCP old by any metric, I was happy even in the day to be of a community where I had an 'at' in my name, not one or more 'bangs'. My network presence dates to somewhere between RFC733 and RFC822. :)

I kinda like the idea of talking about 'age' measuring not from birth but from the birth of adult awareness of the relevant concepts. Then it could happen at different times for different things for different people. My understanding of and entry into the computer world happened much earlier than my appreciation of and need for involvement in the political world, for example.

#Lisp #LispMachine #Unix #ARPA #ARPANET #UUCP #age #aging

The more I play within the #fediverse and its way to interconnect services and users, the more I am reminded of #uucp #bangpath e-mail "routing".

@dalias @astraleureka @xarvos @faoluin @ariadne It's funny that newer protocols tend to deal with asymmetric/diverse link methods (phone, sneakernet, internet, etc), some necessitating first-class support for #AsynchronousCommunication, so badly.

#Usenet, #UUCP and #Fidonet (#email is an outlier that can be carried by all of those and #SMTP too) all dealt with that much better. Of recent projects, only #NNCP and #SSB (and a few more niche ones) appear to have given any real thought to that.

@mattmattmatt I'm already imagining a world where #gopher was available under #GPL from day 1, #UUCP is still in common use, and that little girl in Jurassic Park wasn't special because everybody know #Unix.

@noracodes If they are that oldschool, maybe try UUCP with a bang path?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path

#uucp

@cellio #UUCP was primarily point-to-point oriented though, wasn't it? Though I seem to recall that #NNTP often ran on top of UUCP, and NNTP certainly qualifies as peer-to-peer. They are about equally common in modern use, too. 🙂

I just explained #UUCP routing to someone as a peer-to-peer routing system because people understand that, and that's not wrong but I never heard anyone call it that back then, and now I feel old.

@niconiconi @lanodan Why is there a need for a single file to work over serial?

#UUCP can cope with multiple files, as can #kermit, #rcp & others for interactive use.

That objection aside, yes, you can very well just package all that into an #ActivityStream and pipe it to the server over serial.

@screwtape @dekkzz76 It's fine if you go full #P2P with every user having their own MTA.

I'd be more inclined to use #UUCP or #NNCP (preferably to UUCP, it has a number of significant improvements) than #SMTP on #I2P.