(2024-10-28) Meet ii, a new old distributed plaintext communication network
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Remember FidoNet? Now, imagine something like that but much simpler and over
TCP/IP (as of now, even over HTTP(S)). This is a very vague description of 
what I'm gonna talk about.

As lightweight protocols are among my hobbyist interests, I was delighted to
find out about the existence of such a protocol as ii. Gopher, Nex, Spartan, 
Gemini etc. are nice but they don't solve the problem of distributed 
communication. Email does but it's too complex and bulky. Misfin is fine for 
one-to-one communication but totally impractical for mailing lists or so. We 
really need something like Usenet/FidoNet but without all the crutches of 
the past.

This is what ii is about. It was developed in the spring of 2014 and its
initial author had abandoned it long ago, but it lives in the form of the 
"IDEC network" (where IDEC stands for "ii-like Data Exchange Convention") 
that implements some extensions to the original protocol, which are fully 
optional, and is backwards-compatible with ii. I have tested some of those 
extensions myself but eventually deemed all of them unnecessary for my own 
client purposes, so my client only implements the basic ii standard as 
described in ([1]), and yes, I think my doc is more concrete and concise 
than the original GitHub. Maybe I'll also add it to the Gopherspace to make 
sure it doesn't get lost somewhere.

As for the client, it's called tii, written in Tcl/Tk 8.6 (of course) and
distributed in the same repo ([2]) as a suite of several scripts, including 
the tiifetch.tcl CLI fetcher, tiipost.tcl CLI poster, tiiview.tcl CLI viewer 
and tiix.tcl GUI client. As of now, tiix.tcl depends upon the tiifetch.tcl 
and tiipost.tcl for corresponding functionality, so tii is not a 
single-script solution and wasn't designed to be one. By the way, I couldn't 
find any existing GUI clients for the ii/IDEC network, so tiix.tcl might be 
the first one. Besides Tcllib, the tii suite also depends upon the sqlite3 
package because this is the actual backend for ii message storage.

As for the server side, there exist several ii/IDEC node (aka station)
implementations in various programming languages (mainly C and Python), but 
they have some inconsistency in terms of following even the basic ii specs, 
so I've decided to start working on tiid, my own ii station software. It is 
only going to serve basic ii requests (GET /list.txt, GET /u/e, GET /u/m and 
POST /u/point) and have a message DB format compatible with the client-side 
one. Ideally, it should reuse the same codebase and algorithms from 
tiifetch. The only thing left to design before I start coding this up is the 
mechanism of secure anti-spambot signup without requiring JS or any Web 
browser whatsoever on one hand, and without any manual approvals on the 
other hand. Essentially, this part will probably be more complicated than 
the rest of the node codebase, but we'll see how it goes.

Overall, I think this network has some potential to become a lightweight
censorship-resistant environment island in the ocean of centralized 
locked-down Web bloatware. This is why I'm totally in.

--- Luxferre ---

[1]: https://git.luxferre.top/tii/file/ii-doc.txt.html
[2]: https://git.luxferre.top/tii/file/README.html