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[Redvers Davies]

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 14:19 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Usenet was (well, is, but it has been dying for a long time)

at 3.2Tb of data a day it's far from dead.

> The bad part was that the flood
> fill mechanism means every site in the network has to carry *all*
> traffic even if no one locally is reading a particular
> topic.

... ish.

A usenet server could decide on a group by group or heirarchy by
heirarchy basis what it wanted to take in a feed.  Usenet admins were
encouraged to take everything since that kept article propagation
strongest.

> "Someday" I'd love to create a next generation Usenet that fixed all
> this -- I would distribute only "newsgroup announcements" rather than
> the newsgroups themselves, make the topic namespace subdivided by
> domain names to eliminate the "global namepsace" problem, and use
> a bit-torrent like "centrally tracked but peer to peer distributed"
> transfer method to eliminate the need for giant news spools. However,
> realistically, I'll never have the month to do the work.

There is a project there for sure.  Usenet isn't broken - it just didn't
scale well.  Keeping up with that volume of data now has to be done by
dedicated companies.

I remember when I ran an ISP I siphoned off an almost full newsfeed to
my home machine.  Something that isn't really possible anymore :-)