> Yes, Usenet is better on some dimensions such as offline reading and non-central ownership. However, I think we can agree that typical web surfers don't care about those attributes.

Plenty of typical web surfers care about non-central ownership. But they care about non-central ownership of the things that they like to do online.

What usually happens instead is someone implements a distributed system that can shuttle data in a way that is functionally equivalent to data shuttling which currently relies on a centralized service. Hooray!

Then they write nice documentation that explains to the typical web surfer how exciting it is to go out of band and whitewash a fence.

Typical web surfers interpret that as brain damage and surf away from it.