This seems like a really interesting project. I've been recently playing with trying to get something like nntp to work over point-to-point HAM connections. This would solve a lot of the end goals I've been wanting to get to!
Unfortunately NNTP(like) is the only thing I have never touched at all. I have several years of experience with FidoNet's echomail (this is like NNTP), but today I see that most of discussion is done in mailing lists and I have got no usecases I really could use with something like NNTP (and that is disappointing, because I really like that echomail/news nature).