I think this is the elephant in the room that most "resurrect usenet" proposals ignore. Usenet hosting has coalesced around huge providers because the volume of binaries traffic presents a significant challenge, namely that you need beefy, expensive server infra to manage the traffic and retention.
The "next big thing" after Reddit won't be a plain text-only service. HN and Tildes already serve this niche. So any proposal for USENET 2.0 must provide a treatment of the bandwidth/data retention issue.
Perhaps, but HN only satiates the desire for a text-only forum for a pretty niche community. There are plenty of subreddits that don't really touch on anything tech related. Insofar as binary content goes, Supernews is still around and charges about $12/mo (they're currently running a half off promo).
Sonic's ditched their NNTP servers as they move from being an ISP to a web provider, but back in the day they provided their own NNTP servers and included a Supernews subscription.
I've been trying to remember Supernews all day since talking about it in another thread, but too busy to stop to look it up. Honestly, I'm shocked they have remained a thing.
I think this is the elephant in the room that most "resurrect usenet" proposals ignore. Usenet hosting has coalesced around huge providers because the volume of binaries traffic presents a significant challenge, namely that you need beefy, expensive server infra to manage the traffic and retention.
The "next big thing" after Reddit won't be a plain text-only service. HN and Tildes already serve this niche. So any proposal for USENET 2.0 must provide a treatment of the bandwidth/data retention issue.