Interesting article. I sometimes wonder to what degree we moderns are simply recreating the (failed) systems of old. We are trying to move from twitter to "federated" systems, which are structurally quite similar to usenet. What lessons are we going to learn about why people broadly moved away from usenet to web forums?
Usenet still exists and the store and forward transport mechanism (nntp) and its flooding concept would be fine to transport todays "tweets" or "toots" …
I managed one of the top 100 nodes in the nineties. Two reasons made end users prefer other systems: interactive editing (wysiwyg) as in forum software transfering onto web sites and pictures.
Usenet readers to offer both features could have been developed. And running private leaf nodes (as a number of people did) would have been possible. Instead people moved to other platforms and reinvented many wheels, not always in a better version.
Archiving Usenet articles is and was easy. A forum on the other hand is a tiny walled garden and if the people running it quit, the content is lost.
For adventurous people: its still possible to get a Usenet connection, e.g. for a small fee at http://news.individual.de/ (intro page in German, but Google or Deepl will translate it for you ;-) … disclaimer: I'm just a customer myself there.
Spam would be a huge problem on it though if it were that widely used. It was just not designed to stand up to that kind of abuse. It lacks sender verification etc. Just like SMTP is kludge upon kludge and totally broken, and nobody has done a real modern rewrite because nobody wants to deal with all the legacy.
> Usenet readers to offer both features could have been developed. And running private leaf nodes (as a number of people did) would have been possible. Instead people moved to other platforms and reinvented many wheels, not always in a better version.
But that is a huge drawback of non centralized systems. Multiple implementations are great, until you want to develop a new feature, and then it never happens (or happens very slowly). It takes hard work to get multiple, sometimes even competing people and groups, to have a same vision or goal, and sometimes it is impossible.
And when you do end up updating, there are still people that will complain about it, forever. On this very forum, we often see people complanining that the web is not just static hypertext documents.
I still can remember, that there was a technical hurdle to connect to the Usenet. My memory is from mid-nineties. You had to find the usenet server of your provider, which wasn't broadly pronounce, or even another one. This wasn't feasible for most people. Web forums worked in the browser.
The same was the case with everything else in those days. You had to set up winsock, set your POP3 and SMTP, SLIP/PPP etc. If you weren't technical you were just not on it or you had someone else set it up for you.
We're talking mid-90s and Windows 95 made things a little better but it was still a mess because Microsoft thought they could make their own internet knockoff MSN a success. So they put much more effort into that at first. Thank God they were unsuccessful because the online world would have been even more commercial than it is now. Even now they're willing to risk the tiny market share of edge by spamming people with "special offers"
Webmail was still pretty new and not fully functional. Usenet was just one of the many things to set up. I don't think this was the reason it didn't take off.
In most cases I remember, it was just [usenet|news|nntp].providername.tld
Only if you couldn't find it after trying those, would you have to check the signup info you got from the ISP. Which also included their SMTP server, which, I mean... most customers also got email figured out just fine.
I think the larger issue is that, if you didn't get your email working, life _sucked_, everyone expected you to have it. But if you didn't get usenet working, you were the only one who suffered and a lot of people didn't even know they were missing out. So the incentive to connect simply faded.
