trisquel-users mailing list mirrored to news.gmane.org newsfeed

I don't know what it is but I like it

It is particularly interesting for those who use the mailing list.

Just in case anyone wonders how a newsgroup work in real life, here is an example.

This is a mailing list with several familiar people from this forum and RMS himself, gatewayed to the newsgroup nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.gnu-linux-libre

Instead of subscribing to the relevant mailing list, just subscribe to the newsgroup above and you will have these instant benefits:

(1) You will get only the headers for each message, and that will show up in your newsreader as if a complete mail. Whenever you click on any one of them, the message will be fetched on the spot (and stored permanently in hard disk just like an email). That means, you won't be force-fed *all* the messages, including the ones you will never read. You get just the headers, and you get the message body only when you explicitly clicked on it.

(2) Headers will be fetched in a single digest-like stream, as opposed to separate GET request (quite a background chat!) for each mail in mailing lists.

(3) Once you get in the news server (news.gmane.org) through your news reader, *all* the discussion groups hosted by the server are at your fingertips, a thousand of them at gmane, in a tree presentation. Just click on any one or more of them to subscribe or unsubscribe. A lot less hassle than mailing lists.

Here is a quick how-to with Claws-Mail (mail and news reader). It should be similar in any news reader. Your mail reader (whatever it is) most probably also works as a news reader. To check this, try to create a new account and see whether it offers a newsgroup (nntp) account type. If yes, then it is a news reader as well as a mail client.

Claws-Mail :: Configuration -> Create new account
Give the account a name (e.g. "Gmane"), enter your name and an (any) email address that will be shown with the messages sent by you.

Server information ::
Protocol: [News (NNTP)]
Server for receiving: news.gmane.org
Press [Auto-configure] button
Press [OK] - this gets you out of Configuration dialog.

Now at the left pane (servers and folders) pane you should see a server named "Gmane" (whatever name you have given in the config dialog). Right click on it. In the pop up window click on "Subscribe to newsgroup". You will be presented with an exhaustive list of *all* the mailing lists (that are converted into newsgroups) hosted by Gmane. Select any of them. You can select multiple groups in one go. Press [OK] and all the subscribed groups will be shown as separate folders under the server "Gmane". Just like as if you used sub-folders under a mail server.

Make no mistake. Server looks like a mail server, but it isn't. Subfolders look like mail subfolders, but they aren't (they are separate newsgroups akin to mailing lists). Messages look like email messages but they aren't (they are just headers - the message will download when you actually read it).

And make no mistake again. The group(s) you have subscribed to are not mailing lists. They are proper newsgroups working over NNTP protocol. They just shadow (or follow) the relevant mailing lists, and import the new messages as they are added from them. When you send a message, you send it to the newsgroup, not to the mailing list. But gmane exports (forwards) any new NNTP messages to the relevant mailing lists, the same way it imports new mails from the mailing list. So, there will be a small time lag between someone posts a message to the mailing list and you get it from Gmane NNTP server, and vice versa.

The technology (nntp) is so facilitating that you can subscribe to enormous number of busy newsgroups, and still neither your network nor hard disk, nor CPU will suffer from it. Because only the headers are downloaded, and because they are downloaded in streaming mode (like digests).

There are hudreds of newsgroups there, but I would recommend particularly the one below. Some familiar participants: onpon4, adfeno, alimiracle, jxself, calher, John Sullivan, Richard Stallman, ...

You will feel at home :)

nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.gnu-linux-libre

@heyjoe I think you will find this newsgroup quite stimulating. ツ

> It does nothing whatsoever.

I think you should configure an account just like when you would set up an email account. In your newsreader there should be a way to configure accounts. Just create a new account and point it to news.gmane.org and you should be gtg.

BTW, if you will be submitting messages through Gmane, then in your account configuration you need to specify a working email address. At your *first* attempt to send a message to any newsgroup, Gmane will send you a confirmation email, and upon replying that you will authorized for that newsgroup. This "first time posting" confirmation is done for each newsgroup in Gmane separately.

> By the time I was old enough to understand how to use the Internet, the Web had completely superseded Usenet already in practice.

But the Web didn't supersede mailing lists, did it? Newsgroups is a technology that is specifically tuned for (in place of) mailing lists. As long as there are inferior mailing lists, there will be the superior newsgroups.

BTW Usenet is still there (with thousands of newsgropus), but the cumulative number of newsgroups and mailing lists have been so inflated that they have overflowed Usenet, and now there are a lot of independent, albeit smaller, newsgroups everywhere, just like there are mailing lists. I have to emphasize the fact that while Usenet is the flagship of NNTP news service, Usenet is not representative of NNTP - it is just the biggest service using the protocol. Usenet to NNTP (news) is akin to Gmail to SMTP (email).

> Usenet is really old, dude. It's so old that I've never been exposed to it.

But email is older than newsgroups, and newsgroups is older than Usenet. I.e. Usenet is the youngest of all. :)

I think there is a good deal of misperception regarding newsgroups vs. Usenet, probably because Usenet is the biggest distributed news service and thus become a synonym for newsgroups. I have never proposed trisquel-users to be fed to Usenet. I just proposed to have a stand-alone news service (newsgroup acces) for this forum. And it just so happens that Gmane provides for this (bilateral mailing list <-> newsgroup gateway) for free.

> because my ISP (like most ISPs) does not offer Usenet as a service.

And they don't have to. A news server is like a mail server. Your ISP may have it or not. There are many news servers around the globe with Usenet feed. One difference between SMTP (mail) and NNTP (news) is that, NNTP is a distributed protocol. E.g. a thousand NNTP servers can cross-feed each other with new incoming messages, and any message sent to a specific newsgroup propagates to all servers after a short propagation delay. So, you can connect to a news server in your locality, I can do the same in my locality, we both subscribe to newsgroup X, and my messages posted to my news server will get to your server and vice versa. Multiply this by 10000 servers throughout the world = you got an NNTP network. Usenet is simply the biggest NNTP network of the world. But there are other smaller ones. And there are stand-alone news servers, which don't feed, nor gets feed from any other news server. E.g. news.gmane.org is such a news server, with the sole purpose of converting various mailing lists to newsgropus. E.g. heyjoe had given another example to stand alone news server: openSuse discussion groups.

In short, you don't need your ISP providing an NNTP server with Usenet feed, inroder to subscribe Usenet groups - there are such news servers in your locality. And for Gmane, you need to directly connect to Gmane (news.gmane.org) anyway, regardless of your ISP provides Usenet feed. Because Gmane is a stand-alone server.