NNTP

The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (netnews) between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications.

Usenet was originally designed based on the UUCP network, with most article transfers taking place over direct point-to-point telephone links between news servers, which were powerful time-sharing systems. Readers and posters logged into these computers reading the articles directly from the local disk.

The Tildeverse has a small, private net news network that can be accessed through several tildes using clients below. The node at Tilde.club also provides public access for users outside of the tildeverse, or those who want access without first connecting to a tilde server. More info can be found at https://news.tildeverse.org/

News clients

slrn

slrn is a newsreader; see http://slrn.sourceforge.net/ for details.

First, add export NNTPSERVER="localhost" to your shellrc (.bashrc, .zshrc) and source it (source path/to/.shellrc).

Then run slrn --create to create the slrn config file, and lastly slrn -d to populate group names.

You’re now ready to run slrn! If the list is empty, press L (for list-groups) and enter * in the field for all groups. You might need to enter each group (pressing space) to get a proper count for how many (if any) unread messages there are.

pine/alpine

pine can read news; this http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Help/News/PineNews.html might help. You can also read the FAQ from U Washington.

In Pine do

1. ‘S’ for setup, ‘C’ for config, then
2. set ‘NNTP Server (for news)’ to news.tilde.club
3. Then go back to the main menu, and pick Folder List,
4. A for add, ^t for list

Emacs

M-x gnus in [[[#emacs|emacs]]] can read news, but you better know [[[#emacs|emacs]]] first before you start.

lynx

Lynx reads news, a la lynx news://news.tilde.club/tilde.general. It can even post news, but you have to design your own headers.

tin

There is also tin.

Thunderbird

If you’re using Thunderbird for email, it can also be configured for news.

1. Go to the Tools menu, -> Account Settings
2. Under Account Actions click Add Other Account...
3. Select “Newsgroup Account”
4. Type in the name you and email address you want associated with your posts. This can be your real name and tilde.club email address, or any other name (like your tilde username) and any other email address.
5. For the “Newsgroup Server” type news.tilde.club. Give it a name (“news.tilde.club” works fine), confirm a couple of times and you’re done! You should see a new entry for news.tilde.club in your accounts list.
6. Right click on “news.tilde.club” in your accounts list and click Subscribe...
7. You should see a dialog with a tree of news topics. Click one and click Subscribe to subscribe to the topic. When Thunderbird is running, it will periodically check for new messages to each of these topics. You will also see a list of topics in your accounts list with unread counts.
8. To post to a topic, open the topic and click the “Write” button.