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The principle use-case for Usenet has always been small, controlled-access networks. That's what ARPANET and the early Internet were, where "small" meant < 1 million active participants and "controlled access" meant meeting the requirement of belonging to one of a limited number of academic institutions, tech companies, government agencies, or select military units. Total Usenet participation in April 1988 were 140,000 readers, by Eric Reid's DEC surveys, as cited in John S. Quarterman's The Matrix (1990): <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/page/24...> Spinning up an NNTP group for internal company communications, for a family group, or for a (sufficently tech-savvy) organisation or hobby group would be a viable option. My experience is that peak group experience tends to occur with somewhere between about 5 and maybe 1,000 participants on the high end, and that's being generous. In practice, 5--50 is probably a better sweet spot. The technology isn't the stumbling point nearly so much as convincing people to use the service. In some industries, privacy and disclosure rules may preempt usage (e.g., healthcare, finance). And the fact that Usenet has no intrinsic authentication or attestation of identity (though these can be provided by additional mechanisms such as PGP/GPG signatures) means that publicly accessible newsgroups are likely to be nonviable given malicious actors. What's underappreciated about much of the early Internet / online world is how small most of the "large" (as in influential) groups or movements were. Usenet, the WELL, Slashdot, and early blogging had core groups of perhaps a few hundred to a few thousand people, possibly fewer. Yes, there were additional participants in many cases, but in terms of how concentrated the bulk of activity was, small. |