Newsgroups as in NNTP[1] fits those criteria, no?

Granted, federated bit is more tricky now. Back in the days many if not most ISPs ran a NNTP server. But the protocol supports it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol

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mrweasel 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I loved Usenet back in the day, but I sort of wonder why organisations keep their servers running. I struggle to find any active newsgroups these days. Weirdly enough spam still hits some of the groups.

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e12e 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The D programming language forum is using nntp:

https://forum.dlang.org/help#about

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magicalhippo 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah it died off sadly. Had so many good news discussions back then. Still miss the buzz of downloading a new batch of messages.

I used Gmane[1] to access mailing lists as newsgroups, which I've always thought was a much better fit.

Alas as with all good things that was shut down also.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane

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clircle 7 hours ago | parent [-]

News.gmane.io is up. I use it daily to track a few projects.

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magicalhippo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah, thanks. I knew there were issues, but somehow missed they'd resolved it.

A great service, glad to see it alive and kicking!

	▲	pasc1878 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They have not resolved the big issue. news.gmane.io has always worked. The issue is that the owner of that domain made a mistake and gave the control of the web frontend to someone else who just shut it down.

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WesolyKubeczek 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And conspiracy chain mails still pondering on whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. I joined usenet recently to see how the things were, and it had some serious ghost town vibes.