Time to resurrect Usenet?

I do not know how many of you are old enough to remember Usenet, so briefly: Usenet was a distributed system of message forums, with each forum known as a ‘group.’ Usenet was not dependent on one or even a handful of servers. Rather the groups were hosted by tens of thousands of servers worldwide.


Usenet was pre-website, as difficult as some of you might find that to comprehend. You didn’t register, you couldn’t be banned, and it was very, very difficult to suppress any posts once they were made: your post first went on your local Usenet server and then was distributed to the other Usenet servers all over the globe.


It was a grossly inefficient system, since all of the posts had to be stored on all of the servers, but back in its heyday it was a juggernaut.
Not to mention that it was successfully used to disseminate secret information. In particular, back in the late 90s a list of covert British intelligence officers was posted on various Usenet groups. Try though they might, the British government could not suppress this file.


Unfortunately, by the early 2000s most users were migrating to websites (which control what you can say and filter what you can see) and Usenet was overrun by spammers.
That said, if the president becomes a virtual dictator (the first of many), Usenet v2.0 sounds like a damn good idea. Hopefully leaner and meaner, but with the same mandate: information unbound and unstoppable.