[copied from gopher://hoi.st]

(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 ... [>>>]

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