Nobody's there, though. And the old internet was shaped not just by technology, but by the people who were online

I can chat with my SO over Jabber/Telegram with Biltbee+IRC or Pidgin thanks to Libpurple plugins.

On Usenet, being the only decentralized platform without neither corporation nor goverment control, it will come back, as it's being one of the major points for compsci (esp. comp.arch, where the Comp Sci -actual one- level it's far beyond HN and Slashdot combined). On sci.* you can have both PhD's, crackpot scientists... or both.

Ah, yes, no images/binaries ... but for a special case or a major ground discovery people could make an exception, such as a cure for the Alzheimer and the like. Just uuencode the image and attach it after the post, and at least downsize it to ~640x480 or 720x480 and dither it (if the detail level is not that important).

Ditto with IRC, tons of tech channels are not found anywhere else.