As a loophole to the shenanigans regarding age restricted “website” legislation in western countries, I suspect the reverse to be desirable. IMAP, POP3 and NNTPS are not website protocols and could be exempt from the legislation. Simply making a better, more streamlined “mail” interface could be just what the doctor ordered, especially if offline viewing becomes necessary but this is getting crazy.
If nobody has done so, a POP3 gateway for the ReST interface of the Discord server could be just the ticket! I’ve never done one before and I think it may be time to begin!
I agree with everything except the last sentence.
Non-web protocols are better not only for the reason of age restriction nonsense,but also because the web has become too slow and bloated,there’s too much ads,tracking and big tech bullshit,it just isn’t fun anymore.
That’s why I started a native Usenet newsreader project.
I think that the Usenet could be exactly the place we’re looking for,a big network of independent servers that are difficult to restrict or censor all at once.
Why do we need to have the latest browser and load tons of Javascript just to consume content that is 95% plain text (looking at you,Discourse).
NNTP/Usenet already solved that problem in a much more elegant way: The client is a native application,you only load the content using a standardized protocol.
The Usenet can also provide ways to effectively circumvent the age restriction nonsense even if you’re living in a jurisdiction where it applies: It needs only one Usenet server that operates a .onion domain,and you can access the whole network through it - That’s the point of decentralization.
But please,just let the tracking nightmare that is Discord and even demands face scans or passports die a fast death.
No need to make a nice standardized gateway for a awful proprietary and centralized walled-garden that doesn’t care about its users.
We already have non-web protocols for chat,namely IRC and XMPP,we already have native clients for both and Haiku has a active community over there (primarily IRC,but it can be accessed also from XMPP and Matrix).
By the way,both standards support a lot more features than what we have in the Haiku-native clients right now,so you could help by improving Vision (IRC) or Renga (XMPP) if you want a more modern/feature-rich experience.
I want to install an NNTPS (encrypted NNTP) server on my old ARM7 Cubox using Enigma BBS under a 2-Clause BSD licnsed source code but the database runs on 64-bit Postgres. I just signed up for the $5 a month cheapie rate on PlanetScale.com that hosts PostgresSQL online. The reason it’s cheap is that all the non-database-related static stuff has to be hosted on another server somewhere else, like GitHub Pages or https://codeberg.page/ (for pennies on the dollar hosting rates, by comparison).
I noticed today that the Enigma BBS link above is hosted on GitHub pages already and probably only has the database on PlanetScale also! It was their own advice on the website do do so but even a 3-node replica set plan on PlanetScale is only $15 USD monthly and each node can be in different countires! Fore even more security, I am considering making another on-site server also have replica set status to the cloud version to make sure that if PlanetScale does us dirty then we have a full duplicate version locally to migrate.
Distributed Networking?
I am considering just how obscenely internationally distributed just such a network can be! Database distributed between two different cloud providers for redundancy, static pages on both GitHub Pages AND CodeBerg Pages to have presence in both USA and Germany, for added duplication and have all of them mutually run replica sets from a home-brew server that is a backup to all the rest and a distrubution channel besides!
I see that the NameCheap.com DNS provider supports DDNS so adapting that with an edge server in some other country yet but hosting the static WebAssembly payloads to download from, in Khazachstan or China so the likelihood of Western nations figuring out how to keep my fallback coordination from redirecting all of the subdomains of two different DNS providers in sync with one another from another undisclosed location yet… This is going to be fun!