> I hate facebook message threads because it is effectively impossible to have a conversation there because everything overlaps and I can't take the time to write something clear and in multiple paragraphs.
I've actually adopted some email like conventions when participating in Facebook comment threads. When I click the reply button, it will fill in the name of the author of the comment I'm replying to. I then will append "wrote:" to that line, add a line break, type a > character, and then paste the part of the comment they wrote that I plan to respond to. It almost looks like a quoted email message :)
> I wonder if the right solution is a private usenet server: just like email it is not instant but async, unlike email it is spilt into topics better and you can have new people catch up on threads easily.
With a private NNTP server, you will still need to set up accounts for others to use it. Though if multiple people run their own servers and set up the peering arrangements between then, then it could work without having to set up accounts fro multiple people.
But, the flexibility one can get with email in terms of organizing messages into different folders is lost with NNTP, since that organization is determined by the configuration on the server itself.
