NNTP - a great protocol for bridging?

This gemlog is hosted on ctrl-c.club, a "place for the curious to poke around and play." It's a multi-user unix box as a social network. We have public hosting for the web and gemini, email accounts, IRC rooms, command-line games, and a custom bulletin-board software built by a member called iris.

The original iris client is a pretty bare-bones TUI, pretty much just ruby with readline and some terminal colors. As I started enjoying using it, I was also getting back into usenet newsgroups - which are still around if not exactly thriving. I realized that these systems were functionally really similar, but built on extremely different building blocks. But I wanted access to the relatively mature TUI clients available for newsgroups for browsing iris threads.

So the only natural thing to do was to bridge the protocols so I could browse iris (and later post!) through NNTP clients. Iris-news was born.

=> iris-news: iris to NNTP bridge server

While it's a "server", being a bridge server it's naturally also a client at the same time. And it actually leans heavily in the "client" direction:

• it's only intended to be accessed by the NNTP client for a single user
• it only accepts one single connection from localhost, on an ephemeral port at that
• it shuts down immediately when that single connection closes

And it's...amazing. I love this as a mature interface to iris. A little server programming to a well-documented protocol (with a decent third-party go library), and drop in any existing client to do the ux heavy lifting. It's so good that I'm starting to want to do more.

For one, mature though the newsgroup client world may be, the major TUI players I'm aware of (slrn and tin) still only connect to one server for a given session. But a bridge server could solve that for us - bridging NNTP to NNTP, but letting a client multiplex out to multiple servers. Bring in iris while we're at it.

The newsgroup paradigm is also probably similar enough to the feed reader paradigm and this could be a great way to build a personal gemini reader. Just once at startup (remember this is a pretty ephemeral server) it could go fetch the latest from all the feeds I've configured it for and surface anything new. Well, surface everything and let the client figure out what's new. And since support for threading is built in, it could be more Cosmos than Antenna.

Some sort of micro-blogging format could be a great fit as well, and twtxt is nice and simple.

I'm increasingly thinking of the newsgroups NNTP protocol as a medium for following conversations and excited about the possibilities of a sort of bitlbee-for-newsgroups.

~tjp

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