Mailing Lists vs. Usenet

[Peter Hendrickson <pdh@best.com>]

At 7:59 PM 2/3/1997, Greg Broiles wrote:
> Seriously, if you want a distributed no-choke-points "flooding"
> message distribution system, you're talking about Usenet. Robust
> software exists for clients and servers, and it's already supported
> worldwide on many operating systems. No need to write more software
> to graft that functionality onto E-mail. If the list is going to
> turn into Usenet (we've already got most of Usenet's better kooks),
> we might as well just move the damn thing over to alt.cypherpunks
> and be done with it. (Anyone care to guess who founded alt.* as a
> way to route around censorship?)

> (Of course, Usenet is a technical success and a spectacular failure,
> content-wise. So opponents of moderation will be forgiven for
> failing to mention this sparkling example of an unmoderated,
> anything-goes forum for discussion.)

Several people have brought up this point and it is worth discussing.
There are some differences.

I don't like Usenet's architecture.  It is silly to duplicate vast
amounts of traffic everywhere.  It was a fine idea when there were 100
groups with lots of overlap in what people read.  The horse and buggy
was a good idea once too.

Performance is a problem with Usenet.  The system I envision (nearly
identical to Igor's) would have about ten mail servers, each of which
sends articles to all the others.  Even in situations where something
is wrong, articles will be nearly instantly transmitted along an
alternate path.  I think this is harder to arrange with Usenet.

Competition among Cypherpunks providers works the right way.  If you
are getting your mail on a system which is slow and isn't up all the
time, you have good reasons to switch to another provider.  This is
easy - just subscribe yourself to one mailing list and unsubscribe
from the other.  It's harder for most people to do this with Usenet.
You may not want to switch your ISP to get a better Cypherpunks feed.

In my opinion, Usenet is less conducive to filtering than is mail.  It
is true that there are lots of Usenet readers which can do things like
kill whole threads and the like, but mail just screams "run me through
a perl script!"  This is mostly subjective, of course.

More subjective opinions: I don't like being associated with Usenet.
It is seen as an international bulletin board.  Many people believe
that it is "public" space and should be subject to zoning.  I like the
idea of keeping the cypherpunks list "private".  I like being able to
say "if what's on the list upsets you so much, why did you subscribe?"
This is more effective than "so tell your child not look at Usenet".

I don't like the whole Usenet cabal and all of the voting to decide
which lists to canonize.  Less of an issue with alt.cypherpunks, but
the association is still there.

Peter Hendrickson
ph@netcom.com