Joe Greco wrote on 31/03/2020 15:55:
There's a strange disconnect here. The concept behind Usenet is to have a distributed messaging platform. It isn't clear how this would work without ... well, distribution. The choice is between flood fill and perhaps something a little smarter, for which options were proposed and designed and never really caught on.
Without the distribution mechanism (flooding), you don't have Usenet, you have something else entirely.
Exactly. And there's no disconnect: usenet doesn't scale because each object is copied to all core nodes rather than referenced, or copied-as-needed, or other. This design of distributed messaging platform will eventually break as it grows. It's ok to acknowledge this explicitly: message buses are useful, but they have their limits.
Kinda like how there's a problem with the technology of the Internet because if I wanna be a massive network or a tier 1 or whatever, I gotta have a massive investment in routers and 100G circuits and all that? Why can't we just build an Internet out of 10 megabit ethernet and T1's? Isn't this just another example of your "problem with the technology at the design level?"
No, not even slightly. Is an NSP expected to carry all traffic for the entire DFZ? Because that's your proposed analogue here.
Usage grows. I used to run Usenet on a 24MB Sun 3/60 with a pile of disks and Telebits. Now I'm blowing gigabits through massive machines. This isn't a poorly designed technology. It's scaled well past what anyone would have expected.
yeah, I don't miss those days. I ran news on a decsystem 5100 with a couple of megs of RAM and a single disk. My desktop was a sun 3/60. Not pretty, but at least it could fit 4 xterms on-screen. In that sense, it was almost as functional as my ragingly fast desktop is these days. Nick