I loved Usenet back in the day, but I sort of wonder why organisations keep their servers running. I struggle to find any active newsgroups these days. Weirdly enough spam still hits some of the groups.
And conspiracy chain mails still pondering on whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. I joined usenet recently to see how the things were, and it had some serious ghost town vibes.
I used Gmane[1] to access mailing lists as newsgroups, which I've always thought was a much better fit.
Alas as with all good things that was shut down also.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane