Uhm, "upstream host", is that another computer that receives
to the same feed as you so thus gets your posts or what is it?
Example from real life. In high school I interned at a dinky little
start-up that was a net-news edge node. The system administrators
at that little company set up an internal net news host the same way
someone might bring in an old ping pong table - to improve the work
environment.
That company dialed out to a more established company down the
road that, as a regional industry courtesy, not only hosted its
own internal net news host but connected to even bigger fish
upstream and casually offered peering to local small companies.
Google used its economic power and social influence to first
centralize what was left of mainstream netnews and then to
kill it off.
Well, you can tune into nntp.aioe.org with Gnus this very
instant and see how useful it is. But killed - no.
Yes, I am being a bit absolutist there.
I suppose to be a little more accurate I would say that they
killed it as a way of sharing groups that had developed into
widely used global connected social media (relative to the scales of
its
day).
To be sure, the not-really-multi-media email-style message format
didn't exactly help sustain interested in net news.
-t