Even though I called it a "plan B" in my post on r/UsenetTalk, I did qualify it with a "or A, if you wish." I did that because I don't truly believe in the idea of a back up community.
A community either exists, or it doesn't.
This Black Friday, I am thinking of making the primary deals post here, with a link from reddit.
Would you know, by just looking at Google Groups, that it provides access to Usenet discussions? They have done all they can to obfuscate the matter.
to make USENET profitable
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.
corporate overlords will adopt it without replacing it.
I don't think corporations help here. Google famously bought DejaNews and tried an EEE move on usenet with Google Groups.
accessibility to “normal” people ... we need to have a big-name provider offer free access with no strings attached; no walled garden, no caveats.
This is the point I have been arguing over on the subreddit with a user who is looking at it merely from a technical angle instead of from a regular end-user angle. I have been suggested options like browser extensions.
My answer:
The problem is access + bandwidth. What is easier?
- finding https://news.example.org/g/comp.lang.c/Axxxxxxxxxxx49z on Google/DDG and clicking through
- browser extensions + register for (free) account on Eternal September?
Perhaps.
It is irritating to see all these new discussion platforms reinventing the wheel. They could have tried to build themselves on top of usenet. The distribution problem, at scale, has already been solved there. All they had to do was concentrate on usability. Now, it takes hours for a community to be visible elsewhere.
It might be a local newsgroup.
I don't know the details. My guess, based on the FAQ, is the sdf.* hierarchy would be accessible internally while the public newsgroups (comp.* etc) would be dealt with in the regular manner.
I get a "No Posts" message on my group. The default sort method is "Active." And mods have no way of modifying group settings to change it to something sensible.
Yet another example of user-hostility in software design with Lemmy. The hit-or-miss nature of syncing across instances is another big irritant.