"Terry Roati -> Michiel Van Der Vlist"  wrote:

 MvdV>> Not me. Just like Dale, I was one of the sysops involved in
 MvdV>> the attempt to update P4. I spend a lot of time and energy on
 MvdV>> it. The attempt failed because less than a handful of people
 MvdV>> sabotaged it. At least one of them is still around. Te
 MvdV>> experience of seeing it sabotaged was so frustrating that I
 MvdV>> definitely will not do it again. If you want to give it a
 MvdV>> try, by all means go ahead, but I am out. :(

 TR> Maybe this could be attempted again but it would need to wait till
 TR> the New Year as people are just too busy at this time.

 TR> I would need to look at the proposal again as on first reading the
 TR> changes didn't make any real change.

 TR> I have been out  of Fido the last 15+ years, a list of pros & cons
 TR> for the proposal would be a good starting point to do a proper review.

Today Fidonet has around 1000 nodes. In the 90s a single region was often much
bigger than that. A RC from the 90s had more nodes in their nodelist segment
than todays IC. I think it roughly compares like this:

Today       1990s
==========  ==========
Int. C      Regional C
Zone C     Net C
Regional C  Point and User C (aka Node)
Network C   Finger and Toe Coordinator

Today we have 200 coordinators. I don't read every echo, but it feels like
there are more coordinators than active echomail participants in Fidonet. Is
this organizational structure with the geographic regions, the centralization
of power and insufficient democratic control still useful? (and was it ever
useful?)

A new policy needs more radical change than the proposed P5. Political
bullshit, abuse of power by some assholes and the very crude centralized
methods of distributing the nodelist killed Fidonet. I joined Fidonet in 1993
when we had two parallel Fidonets in R24 (the restructured one sanctioned by
the ZC2 and the so called Fido Classic). This is exactly the stuff that the P4
enabled. The creation of the P4 was one of the biggest mistakes in Fidonet.
Maybe the biggest failure was to keep the P4 alive for 30 years without working
on any solution for a decentralized nodelist distribution.

I wonder why other networks do work great without any policy? E.g. XMPP,
ActivityPub, Matrix, Zot, SIP, Psyc, bittorrent, IPFS, ...

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