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Could Usenet get “revived”, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit?

Technically yes. Become widely adopted, maybe if...

There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed message header/footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the transport/storage but they all need some tender loving care.

In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide them a UI/UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this.

Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles. I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble/Murmur for voice.




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