Hi Oli,

On Nov 15, 2019 06:11pm, Oli wrote to Terry Roati:

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

The internet was the death of Fidonet, instead of users spending time on a BBS
reading echos, downloading files and playing games the users slowly moved to
the internet so Fidonet lost it's user base and the expertise it had.

Most of the Users now are sysops.

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

Nothing changed with the structure, just a lot less sysops and users.

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

There is no power in Fidonet, P4 hasn't changed so it's the same as when I
left it 16 years ago.

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

Everyone has an opinion, everyone thinks they know the solution, but no one
does anything but talk about it. That is clear since the last attempt to
change anything was in 2004.

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

Most other networks are normally run by a one or a small number of sysops
which works well till the guy at the top goes then it collapses, as history
has shown. It is easy to criticize Fidonet but it managed to connect the whole
world and 30,000+ sysops, no other net will ever get close to that.

Can things be improved, absolutely, remember that will require a consensus.


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