[dunnevens]

I'm a little surprised no one's tried reviving newsgroups for discussions. Decentralized, not privacy-invading, can be rendered by a large variety of front-ends. Somewhat censorship resistant. There would be a huge potential spam problem, but that can be controlled by filters and moderators.

Maybe Usenet would be more of a headache than it's worth, but it seems perfect for what you're describing.

[dredmorbius]

It's been tried, numerous times.

Usenet still exists. Outside very small pools, it's dead, or a spam wasteland.

Peter da Silva, an early heavy user (the first and fourth most prolific poster one month in the late 1980s / early 1990s, according to a reply he made to me at G+), created, and still runs, Usenet II. Which is also a wasteland.

The client-independence is a benefit only up to a certain degree. Consistent characterset (8-bit ASCII largely), no binaries / multimedia (uuencoded excepted), and consistent forms of address and reply (mostly), kept things sane.

But even between the tin/rtin and emacs newsreader camp, quoting styles differed. I don't recall if it was @gumby or others (and I'm positive one case was someone else, involved in xemacs development), but even one emacs-variant style of reply-quoting turned disruptive when trying to nest multiple levels deep.

("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Don't do that then.")

These aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles to be mounted. On which deciding is likely the hardest part.

[pasabagi]

It's full of really bizarre spam, though - and I got the feeling that it isn't technically straightforward to stop people from spamming, beyond everybody just keeping thousand-entry killfiles.

It's also very slow. And the posting format is very hard to follow sometimes, especially when you get people that don't do hard line breaks (or the other way around, depending on the program you're using) or have funny ideas about quoting.

Also, the lack of moderation seems to create a very wild-west style of conversation, where apparently rational people can start spewing really hardcore invective at the drop of a hat.

[kbenson]

Newsgroups with an extension that signed your post as a verified account (handled by whatever the moderators decide is good) and with some middleware to accept signed/allowed posts automatically would probably do it, if you could get people to actually use it enough to get momentum.

Edit: I suspect something like this probably existed. It seems straightforward and obvious enough that I'd bet it did exist, but couldn't get much usage in a world where spam wasn't quite as bad, numbers of users were smaller, and people were already shifting to HTML based platforms.

[chocolatebunny]

Middleware to accept signed posts, eh? I smell BLOCKCHAIN!

[4bpp]

I assume that it suffers from the same problems that make me usually give up when I find that a FOSS project's only venue for support and bug reports is a mailing list: search and discovery is less than optimal, conversations just randomly die and as an outsider you get the UX of shouting at a wall (usually nobody will respond, and you will never figure out if this is because your message was filtered, the mailing list is dead or slow-moving or everybody there just saw your message, quietly shook their head and moved on; sometimes someone randomly responds to you 3 years later after you have long moved on, which you only randomly find out when googling your name another two years after that).

[phs318u]

If someone resurrected Compuserve, I’d pay. Again. The signal to noise ratio was insane. Having to part with real money tends to focus the mind and the tongue.

[schmudde]

I suppose The Well is one option: https://www.well.com/. Decades of ongoing discussion.

People in tech undervalue what older communities offer. If the discussion group hasn't become a wasteland after a few years, there is something there.

[chapium]

Public slack and discord servers are essentially this. Organized by topic of interest and the posts are searchable.

I'd argue its a usenet/irc hybrid.