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On 2024-04-17 18:07:39 +0000, SugarBug said:

> On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:39:50 -0000 (UTC)
> doctor@doctor.nl2k.ab.ca (The Doctor) wrote:
> 
>> Getting high schools to a Usenet project should be
>> the advocacy of everyone here!
> 
> Moderated NNTP newsgroups are well-suited to academic environments.
> 
> In certain academic and scientific circles much communication is still 
> done via email using clients that still have built-in NNTP capability.

When I was working at different companies, I always wondered why all of 
them use mailing lists instead of local newsgroups. Local newsgroups 
just make much more sense, and make many things easier.

Not sure if access to global Usenet would be useful in businness 
environment, but local NNTP server is a good idea, in my opinion. I was 
never in a position to propose any changes, though.

Quick google search shows that the same thing was proposed many times 
in the past, for example, a book Practical Internet Groupware by Jon 
Udell starts with a chapter called "Lotus Notes, Web Bulletin Boards, 
and NNTP Newsgroups":

<https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practical-internet-groupware/1565925378/ch01s07.html> 


> All that we lacked was our own dedicated news server. When I 
installed one—and eventually, several assigned to different roles—we 
began to learn what can be done with a dedicated NNTP conferencing 
system that operates apart from the worldwide network of replicating 
Usenet servers. Conferencing servers are tremendous assets. In Chapter 
3 and Chapter 4, I’ll show some of the ways to use them, and in Chapter 
13, I’ll show how to install and configure them. But first, let me 
anticipate the question you should probably be asking now: “If NNTP 
servers are so darned useful, how come hardly anybody seems to use 
them?” Thereby hangs a tale.

Not sure what the tale is, it seems that full text of the book is still 
unavailable for free.

Here is another article by Jon Udell where he talks about pretty much 
the same thing, "Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration":

<https://jonudell.net/GroupwareReport.html>

> This year, the Usenet celebrates its 20th anniversary. It's the 
grandfather of all groupware systems: a planetary discussion network 
that supports tens of thousands of virtual communities. At their best, 
these shared spaces enable groups of like-minded individuals to 
collaborate rather effectively. At their worst, they're overrun by 
spam, smut, and nonsense. This degradation poisons our notion of the 
Usenet and, what's worse, prevents us from fully understanding and 
exploiting some really useful, and well-established, collaborative 
tools -- NNTP (Net News Transfer Protocol) servers and clients.

> We can, and probably should, re-invent the Usenet. Even when it works 
well -- there are, for example, many high-quality moderated Usenet 
groups -- its replication scheme has become terribly inefficient. Any 
given Usenet node receives and processes vastly more messages than 
anyone attached to that node will ever read. Why? When the Usenet grew 
up, there was no such thing as a near-universal real-time-connected 
data network. Replication was the only way to propagate messages 
worldwide over diverse and intermittently-connected networks. Today 
newsreaders can connect instantaneously to many different news servers, 
just as browsers connect to many different Web sites.
> Let's imagine an alternative Usenet. It has the same number of 
virtual communities and the same number of nodes. But each node is 
responsible for just one or several shared spaces, not all of them. 
(NNTP replication might still mirror nodes to a few locations around 
the world, to improve local access, but the storage and processing 
costs of replication would be vastly reduced.) When each node processes 
vastly fewer messages, the focus can shift from quantity to quality. 
Here are some of the implications:
> ...

I wonder what he thinks about NNTP and Usenet now. Seems that he is 
still active, perhaps someone can email him or invite him here.