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Illuminant is an ActivityPub server with an NNTP interface, written in Haskell.

Mick Collins writes

"When is someone gonna federate a USENET server so we can take this full-circle?"

Illuminant is an ActivityPub server with an NNTP interface, written in Haskell.

https://koldfront.dk/git/illuminant/about/ https://illuminant.asjo.org

Adam Sjøgren asjo@koldfront.dk - @[email protected]

So, a few challenges present themselves.

First, get a modern NNTP client that has support for the NNTPS (secure) protocol. It looks like "tin" will do that, but the default version of tin you get from Homebrew for your Mac doesn't have NNTPS support compiled in, so you'll need to download it and compile it yourself.

https://tin.org

./configure --with-nntps=openssl was the invocation that worked for me. Once tin is built, you can try to point it at Adam's installation, and you can connect but you'll be presented with a password prompt which of course there is no good answer to. Illuminant is essentially a single-user NNTP spool, and you'll want to run it yourself.

I got this far and then decided to not go down the rabbit hole of getting a proper Haskell build environment set up, not at midnight at least.

maintaining continuity in the face of disappearing data

If you have a chat system that deletes its history regularly, and if you want to maintain some long-term memory that outlasts the history purge, and if you don't have blogs or wiki or any other sort of public place to put things;

then you put together a regularly posted document and resend it at intervals, perhaps in FAQ format, so that people on the channel see it repeatedly even if they are new to it.

source: Usenet News, from before most nodes were also on the Internet.