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While the second paragraph has been slightly debunked, the first paragraph is an interesting idea I've underappreciated/neglected until now.
What do you think? Perhaps this is easier/more-scaleable than having federated instances with decentralised and often complex governance?
Yes and no.
Usenet is decentralised but hardly any relevant discussions in society happen there. (Unless you prove me wrong.)
What matters is that the platform in question is useable and solved relevant communication/coordination problems. And it's not clear, that one is always better than the other.
For Blockchains and crypto, automation and decentralisation works well in hand. But for softer topics like like aggregation forums, it's not clear IMO.
Huh? It used to be more important than reddit ever was. And people can always go back there. It is decentralized but does not feel decentralized to users. All discussion groups from every server are automatically merged together into one.
It used to be. It isn't. He was pointing out that it's irrelevant today, and he's not wrong.
There are probably people who still say kbin is irrelevant today. Things can change. All it would take is some free Usenet web interfaces like fedverse has. Usenet is older than Fedverse but still does certain things better, like automatically merging together all similarly named groups from every server. And the newsreaders are much better at showing you only what is new.