HyperNews

HyperNews:  Direct Threaded USENET.

When you follow someone up, your post doesn't
contain their post.  It contains a pointer to
their post.  People's newsreaders automatically
fetch as much of that post as necessary.

Posts are in SGML.  No more seeing .sigs in followups.
No more seeing .sigs at all, if you want.

.sigs are replaced with pointers to .sigs, anyway.
Reverse temporal .sig correction.  That way your .sig
is always current in every post.

News isn't distributed.  Not in the verbal sense.
News is distributed, instead.  In the adjectival sense.

HyperNews is a gigantic global distributed database.
No expiring people's posts; they stick around as long
as the site that originated decides to keep them.  But
since they're only keeping outgoing news, it's a far
more manageable quantity.

Except at the sites that post 99% of alt.sex.binaries.

Fascist systems take the HyperNews storage out of the
poster's quota.

If it's worth posting, it must be worth spending your
quota on it, after all.

Then again, just post a file you already have, for free.
Posting /etc/termcap doesn't take any storage, or any
bandwidth--not until someone reads it, anyway.

Oh, sure, to be practical, you keep something a lot
like the current news distribution system.  You have
to.  But it's just a cache, man.

No cache coherency problems, it's a WRITE-ONLY world.
Except for those .sigs, but that's different.  We can
live with reverse-temporal .sig correction not working
perfectly for cached posts.  It's only News, after all.

buzzard
Best of all, everyone already HAS an archive of all their posts