I've used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450.
In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn't a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge.
In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users.
As the article pointed out, that wasn't the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins.
Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don't see a revival coming anytime soon.
In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn't a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge.
In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users.
As the article pointed out, that wasn't the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins.
Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don't see a revival coming anytime soon.