Adam Back:

What do people think of starting an alt.cypherpunks USENET newsgroup?

It has some advantages:

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And some disadvantages...

1. Cross-posting in USENET is a problem, especially in alt newsgroups

2. Commercial spam is a problem with newsgroups

You may want to check out alt.sysadmin.recovery; they use the moderation mechanism to produce a group that is unmoderated, but spam-resistant. It would be impolite to describe the technique, but it should be apparent if you browse a few articles. Another way to avoid crossposts is to have a robomoderated group, where a bot automatically rejects articles which are crossposted, and approves all others.

3. USENET distribution is likely less efficient of overall bandwidth

4. News propogation times are often poor (Exeter univ. receives news about a week late) This is a real killer in my view. I have another news server I can access at the moment, but not everyone may have access to a reasonable news server.

5. News access is more complex for some people. Some alt newsgroups are not carried by some servers. Perhaps news-to-mail and mail-to-news gateway would solve these problems.

6. Some have argued in the past on this topic that the mailing list medium is better because it is more exclusive, as it requires more technical competence, and an active enough interest to subscribe. This is an elitist argument. Perhaps it is relevant though, if we are trying to maintain a mailing list where technical discussions on how to improve privacy are to take place. I wouldn't call this attitude censorship though.

7. Usenet traffic, at least in remote regions (looks around), is often assigned less bandwidth/lower priority than mail, so a reader may not see all of the messages (AFAICT, I normally see about half or less of what actually gets posted to the groups I read), even if the group is "well propagated".

[...]

John P. john@huiac.apana.org.au