Still a fan of NNTP... thinking of doing something similar with HTTP and Cloudflare workers (and adjacent service). Durable Objects for incrementing counters per group, and R2 for header/body storage. Not inherently distributed to separate servers, but an open enough API that it would be similar and allow for other implementations. Only thinking CF, in that I wouldn't have the issues of trying to self-scale in the same way something that could be simple if it gained wider usage.

With "nntp//rss" you could get the best of both worlds. It contained both an NNTP server and an RSS aggregator, with a web interface for administration.

It's no longer maintained, but it was a great concept

Gnus having NNTP and it's "nnrss" module means its my default newsreader.