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 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.