Forget forums. Forget mailing lists. Bring back NNTP, so we can just point people at com.mycompany.engineering.infrastructure and not worry about setting up another lame inbox filter.
It works out quite nicely for us.
I love how snappy they are.
it solves all these problems decently well. i hate mailing lists, because they're not that efficient to use, and that includes the google ui to stuff (and gmail for that matter).
Sadly, I think that culture and clients are likely to sabotage this. Usenet worked pretty well when it was a handful of marquee tech firms and edus using tin or gnus. Similarly, email list work pretty well when everyone's using pine or mutt, understands threading, and uses postfix response format.
The worst mess I ever saw was a list that mixed entertainment industry types with techies, using a wide range of email clients, and featured a lot of people who really liked the sound of their own voices (talked, and wrote, far too much). It was all but impossible to follow discussions, threads were utterly mangled, etc., etc.
So I'm not sure Usenet can continue to work, on a wide scale (not to mention most people don't have a client installed). Though one can hope.
The software is just an intermediary that connects people having discussions and collaborating.
The first version may well be a web forum.
The second version may well be an email interface / mailing list.
The third version may well be native mobile apps.
But all versions work all of the time and people should be able to connect around their shared interest regardless of how their interface preference might divide them.
In that regard, you have the usenet dream of people picking whatever client they love, and there's little reason NNTP can't just be one of the available interfaces to the underlying swirl of discussion and collaboration.