It is decentralized, multiple clients where available and you could segment into as narrow topics as you'd like.
Indeed, it was a lost opportunity. The protocol os easy to understand, and it plays well with decentralization as you say, and with self hosting.
With Python 3.12 out, its nntplib module is scheduled for deletion/removal in v3.13. What a pity.
The NNTP protocol surely deserves a revival.
To avoid impersonation, you'd have to sign everything, which I guess is possible, but experience shows crypto done properly is a huge pain. We already see how unsatisfactory this works with email.
Plus, does usenet scale as well as, say, reddit? Sometimes heated threads are more like comment streams with probably dozens of comments per second.
How can these be solved with a few improvements?
Also, there is a reason why binary content was first frowned upon, then became essentially a paid feature. It's expensive.
On Usenet you can easily stop following a group or person.
Or you accept the fact that what you write is a permanent record. (Local admins can delete messages from their servers if there is a problem with the content.)
That being said, there are Control messages (RFC 5536 § 3.2.3), and one of the things that they can do is cancel an article (RFC 5537 § 5.3). You'd probably want to authenticate the cancel messages of course:
* http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/READ...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_message
Worth noting that you can't force servers to honour the cancel messages and delete the article on their local storage.
Bad service drives out good service just like bad money, for some reason. Centralized beats decentralized because convenience. The convenience is what they're paying to entice you to come into their home and let them eat your brains, and every single person falls for it, probably including you and me.
Classic Usenet is still around. If you have an email address, you can get an account on Eternal September. There aren't that many users. You can be one of them.
* provide identities
* moderate content
* vouch for integrity
* enforce a consistent set of features
The same problems haunt email. It's also why Marlinspike was always against federating Signal. Decentralization comes with some hard problems.
NNTP needed things to be sure but the above issues have technical solutions that seemed out of reach not because they were too complex to solve, but is seemed as if society itself wanted multimedia web pages like a coke addict.
Also things like digital identity seemed to flag as innovation for such things stalled out around the time HTTP became rising. I remember moving data between mainframes from different vendors and what was once a set of problems that seemed intractable suddenly fell as TCP/UDP/IP took off with a suite of solutions that worked so well together.
USENet was a better place to get good information compared to web pages at that time in parts due to bad web site designs and DMCA takedowns, neither of which was an issue for NNTP. I like Reddit because (at least old.reddit) is similar to USENet in how it is structured.
Had NNTP adopted HTML and Netscape written a browser for news groups using HTML, the so-called 'world wide web' and it's anachronistic client-server model might not have effectively displaced NNTP.
I still hands on a couple of groups though the traffic there is getting thinner with each day...
It was simple. I wasn't forced with account (though would be nice/useful nowadays I guess with all the impersonation and whatnot), threading was awesome. Scoring+plonk was even more amazing. There was a problem with syncing what was read and not but that could be easily improved now...
I think I mostly miss scoring - it was such an amazing tool to manage/filter out desired content...
Those gatekeepers never saw the train coming (web) and then it was too late.
What changed was the user profile. Late 80s/early 90s internet was used almost exclusively by academics and engineers. Mid-90s onwards it was open to everyone, and Usenet access was a free feature of most dial-up accounts.
Usenet was ground zero for that change, because university and corporate admins had to deal with a lot of new groups - including those devoted to binaries, and especially porn.
There was a lot of gatekeeping, but the useful groups either migrated or disappeared under spam, and the conversations moved elsewhere.
HN is probably the closest thing to the original culture, but HN's single page design means you don't get the intense focus and conversational momentum of Usenet's professional groups.
I could trawl through a few blogs of course, but I'd be interested to hear what you do yourself for a current snapshot of usage. I think it sounds interesting myself, and have read some quite convincing propagandastic material from Harley Hahn about it working through some Unix book a little while back.