It is ironical that we talk about usenet everywhere but on usenet. Events like the blackout on reddit and the scramble to move to alternate platforms would hardly be necessary if usenet worked clearly as a discussion platform.
While everyone blames spam for the slow death of discussions on usenet, I think there are a couple of other reasons:
- access over http
- searchability
These two reasons are why Google Groups continues to work while discussions on usenet barely do.
Usenet has to evolve to provide solutions to these problems:
- spam: moderated groups are an insufficient solution when compared to moderation tools provided by modern discussion platforms.
- usenet over http: people should be able to carry on discussions using browsers as well as apps. They should be able to share links to these discussions as well.
- search: people should be able to conduct a search across all discussions by using native as well as third-party search engines (Google, Bing, Brave etc).
No one owned USENET, therefore there was not much investment in it. The question is how to make USENET profitable so that our corporate overlords will adopt it without replacing it.
Hosting binaries is costly. Text is fairly cheap.
Any reasonably technically competent person can host it online for < $100/y if they want a replacement for web forums. You could even write a brand new nntp server in less than a week. The standard is simple.
If you want federation, then you have to consider peering with other servers to share feeds.
I don’t think corporations help here. Google famously bought DejaNews and tried an EEE move on usenet with Google Groups.
Google has never had a functional profit model. There is probably some way to make it a resource without making it a walled garden.