Usenet is still a thing, but it’s all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform.

People stopped using Usenet for discussion in large part because of overwhelming spam problems and a lack of infrastructure to mitigate it.

You could maybe build some sort of system to mitigate that.

• Maybe automated text classification is good enough to do on a distributed level, on client machines, now. Problem is that automated text generation to try to defeat it has also probably improved, and I’d tend to bet on the spammers having the advantage.

• Maybe an out-of-band mechanism to generate information about posts would work. Have Usenet clients support pulling a database of scores for current posts in a group. Like, have some server(s) that generates various types of scores (advertising, flameware, etc) text scores for posts. Can incorporate various human moderation in that scoring, maybe let an end user subscribe to one or more “moderators”, which I understand BlueSky does something like.

Honestly, though, the Threadiverse mostly does what I want as a distributed discussion forum. I’m not sure what large benefits Usenet brings to the table relative to it.