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USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Lack of censorship tools is a strength.
Clearly you aren't old enough to remember why Usenet faded away in the first place. It was the first platform to drown in an endless torrent of spam and low quality posts
You're being charitable, imo. USENET was plagued by a seemingly never-ending parade of mentally ill savants who lived to post, lived to troll and lived to avoid killfiles. It made it deeply unpleasant.
I see in the AMA they're discussing moderated newsgroups, I never saw any in my day but frankly, moderation is often worse. Reddit had, I think, the most workable idea of them all, community policing and hiding content beneath a threshold. The unfortunate corporate reality of Reddit begat Lemmy and here we are now.
With Lemmy and the Fediverse, I don't see USENET as being in any way relevant, other than its continuing role as a solid resource for above-average pirates. I don't miss it even a little bit, it was utter rubbish by the end.
Ultimately Lemmy isn't any better than Reddit because your "account" is tied to a server, so it isn't truly censorship resistant. It can easily get as bad as Reddit is with the ham fisted censorship at the whim of some misanthropic moderator.
Nostr is certainly the future once it matures a bit more and becomes more user friendly.