[Bender]

Why is Usenet not coming back?

It likely will. Give it some time for more internet screws to be tightened around the world. Once people see the screws had Loctite applied they will find more alternatives and revive older transports protocols. Usenet is still the vastly superior medium for automatically sharing massive amounts of multimedia content if one filters on pre-shared subjects preshared secrets, GPG signed messages. The spam can be entirely and automagically ignored.

My personal preference will always be anonymous Chroot SFTP and people using the LFTP client with the mirror subsystem and SFTP to split up batch jobs and individual files into multiple TCP streams. It works like rsync but much better as long as there are not massive numbers of nested sub-directories. LFTP+SFTP+mirror can easily max out any fiber connection but can also be rate limited with very granular controls. It's great for small circles of friends being significantly more secure and private. It's also super easy to automate uploads and downloads via cron. For even greater anonymity friends can build their own Tinc VPN mesh open source in a multi-star configuration so people do not see each others IP addresses. Internet bots don't even know what to do with anonymous chroot sftp and that's assuming I leave it on the default port.

[Fabeltjeskrant]

Yeah, but that’s not what I was referring to. I know Usenet is nowadays mainly used for sharing “massive amounts of multimedia content”, but I was referring to the text-based content. Discussions, stories, proposals. Yes, I have seen all that on Usenet. I am that old. I’m not being nostalgic here, but when I think of the pre-spam Usenet, it might be what we need again. Maybe with a more modern UI? Lemmy, maybe? A federated forum system like Reddit, 4chan? Does that exist at all? A web UI which shows threads from all kinds of servers all together in a phpBB-like interface?

[cmacleod4]

Web UIs exist with a variety of interface styles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . The now-defunct novaBBS was probably the closest to phpBB in style, but the new go-pugleaf is aiming in a similar direction.