It's so disappointing that we could have had Usenet, but instead have centralised/corporate/ad/spyware invested Facebook/Reddit/Xitter/Tiktok.

spam murdered it.

It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.

Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.

Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.

https://eternal-september.org/ last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.

But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.