from Hacker News

Superhighway84 – a Usenet-inspired decentralized internet discussion system

by d99kris on 12/27/21, 2:26 AM with 78 comments

• by RF_Savage on 12/28/21, 12:51 AM

  I wanted to ask why use this instead of the still existing Usenet. But the IPFS based hosting is a neat idea.

  This solves the problem that Usenet has with ISP's dropping the alt hierarchy for example. Using IPFS also deals with the hurdle of actually hosting the News servers.

  I wonder how it will deal with the inevitable spam and csam.

  Still, I'm following this with interest.

  Aether was interesting, but it's many tcp connections chocked my consumer grade modem to death, which made it impossible to keep my node online. It was a legit cool project. I wonder if the #radio group I started still exists on it...

• by apatters on 12/28/21, 3:48 AM

  A lot of the comments here seem to be missing the point and presumably come from people that didn't actually install the program and try it out, or hell even read the README.

  This thing is extremely minimalist. A little bit silly to be talking about adding Markdown, antispam or privacy support when it uses $EDITOR for viewing/authoring posts, and the DB is world writeable...

  Personally I think this is a lot of fun, it's the first project that has actually motivated me to install IPFS (which I thought would be much harder). It is in the vein of something like SDF where the retro interface might attract the right kind of people. I hope the author keeps working on it and if I knew Go I might contribute :)

• by ntauthority on 12/28/21, 1:26 PM

  It's a little ironic that this application actually does not run on Windows[1] apparently due a bug in a library[2] unfixed since 2018, which is owned and maintained by a $83B publicly-listed company[3], last updated 14 days ago, but unwilling to fix that little cross-platform bug.

  [1]: https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84/issues/13

  [2]: https://github.com/uber-go/zap/issues/621

  [3]: https://github.com/uber-go

• by LeoPanthera on 12/28/21, 2:44 AM

  It's a shame that Usenet did not persist. There's nothing stopping anyone from using NNTP to create a new separate "forum" that is not connected to "Usenet".

  But since Usenet lost its popularity there's very little NNTP client software available now.

  A shame.

• by dcposch on 12/28/21, 7:50 AM

  Ah the aesthetics are absolutely perfect.

  software minimalism x vaporwave

  And it's not just empty nostalgia. A text interface should be lightning fast. Hit a button, next screen repaint reacts. The ultimate retort to all the 5mb websites full of dropped frames, drop shadows and jank.

  Solidity developers are already out here counting every instruction. Maybe what's old is new.

• by peterth3 on 12/28/21, 12:15 AM

  I’m confused by the term “decentralized internet.” The internet has always been decentralized. When the internet was created it’s primary use case was for decentralized communication.

  A better term might be “blockchain internet”?

• by grenoire on 12/28/21, 12:06 AM

  This feels very... style over substance? As if it was designed with a 'usenet was so hacker-cool' idea behind it.

• by vzaliva on 12/28/21, 3:11 AM

  The idea of building new Usenet-inspired discussion system is great. We can update it with new distributed tech, privacy, etc. However authors chose to limit it to "retro text-only inteface." In my opinion this is a handicap. At least basic hypertext a-la Slack markdown is expected. Otherwise it will appeal only to old users reminsicing about good old times.

• by ddingus on 12/28/21, 4:11 AM

  Cool!

  I'm off to read about it. ...the basic idea on the main page is super attractive.

• by Aeolun on 12/28/21, 1:06 AM

  That domain! I’m surprised it didn’t trigger any security filters.

  That said, this looks really cool. I like it integrates with your own editor.