I am reading up on Mattermost, and a voice in my head keeps saying "just run an irc server again, Neil".
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@neil Eyeball the frontpage of the project tho - they, uh, are rather deep into a particular focus market
@neil thinking back to the happy times when I could read raw P10 like I was in the matrix
@neil decoded.legal NNTP server when?
@dequbed I've looked at this several times, but never actually got as far as implementing it. But nntp's decline does feel like a loss.
I ran an NNTP server for a while about 20 years ago (and wrote a Mac NNTP client). It wasn’t great. There were a bunch of things that were standard in email but were not written up as NNTP standards, but were mostly supported because a lot of clients talked mail and news protocols. The server software all assumed that you had an ephemeral feed that was syndicated, rather than being a stand-alone persistent server, so needed a lot of config prodding to not delete old messages.
I did ponder writing a forum that had an NNTP interface. A few other people tried but I never saw a good result.
One thing I have been considering recently is a forum-like thing with an IMAP interface: create an account by sending a DKIM-signed email, that lets you get read-only IMAP access (most mail services now can add remote IMAP accounts that they sync from, Dovecot can natively handle remote folders), and provide a read-only web mirror. This could support folders per channel, and target email addresses per channel, but support cross posting better than separate mailing lists by showing the entire thread in both folders (and not requiring you to subscribe to / sync both).
@david_chisnall @neil yeah something IMAPv4 is probably a much better basis to build this off than NNTP (but NNTP has at least gotten SASL since then! 😜 )
@neil yeah, same. I wish there existed a sensible way of having NNTP for essentially forums without having to have a webfrontend. Mailing lists but forum. But yeaaah, I think that would be a hell of a program to build for the like 3 people that would use it
@neil I frankly prefer IRC to all these slow we-want-to-shove-everything-in-here services.</greybeard>
@neil we use it for EMF orga and it's definitely better than IRC for lots of reasons for that sort of thing.
