IRC is still evolving: https://github.com/ircv3 https://irc.com/

I liked Usenet and IRC. It would make the internet great again.

I still use IRC. I run my own email server (and haven't had problems so far). There are more protocols than just SMTP and HTTPS. (I even sometimes make up new ones, although sometimes the existing ones will do, even the ones that aren't so common.)

And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.

NNTP (USENET) is fast, scalable and very practical.

I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.

It is also overrun by people who use it to share large binary files of copyrighted material, and spammers, and so on and so forth.

One way to mitigate spam on Usenet is moderated newsgroups.

Another way might be something similar to ad-blockers for web browsers.

I find that self-regulating communities are much better at it than large platforms with lengthy EULAs written by lawyers. So yeah, if the people I cared about were on UseNet and IRC, I'd switch back to them in an instant.

   The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really.

Was it that, or was it that the open internet was proving more difficult to monetize? Knock on effects on resources thrown at UX may be relevant.

It's not about UX, it's about how awful people are. Hacker News is an amazing place, and it's not because of the UX, which is certainly of a piece with the Old Internet. It's because there are people who put a lot of effort into making it a not a giant cesspool. And even then, it can be incredibly difficult to discuss some topics here because discussion becomes overrun by bad actors. If you want to get a sense of what the Internet would be like without an amazing amount of curation, go read the comments on basically any story run on a local newspaper or TV station, where they don't have the resources to do content moderation. Read up on the people who get PTSD having to filter content off Facebook so that an unsuspecting user doesn't run across child porn or a snuff film. The walled gardens exist because the places outside of the walls are <em>awful.</em> And they're a lot more awful if you exist outside of the band of college-to-middle-aged white men who makes up the bulk of the people who experienced the old Internet or who post here on HN. If you're in a lot of more socially vulnerable positions, Twitter is far more a fenced garden than a walled garden. But that fence is still a lot more protection than you'd get on a platform that doesn't have to do that kind of moderation to be viable to advertisers. Monetizing the Internet has had a lot of knock-on effects, but one of those effects is that it's really really hard to monetize open neo-Naziism and a lot of other awful things, so the big players clean up their platforms. Recent years have shown that it's easy to monetize a lot of racist dog-whistling, though. It's not perfect. But an alternative to what we have now needs to start from a point of how do you reduce harassment and social harms, not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before.

>not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before.

In my book, they're moderately worse. I entered the internet around the time of free web forums, where anyone could run one for any reason. I moderated a couple moderately sized ones, mostly oriented around computer games. Overall it wasn't too bad. Certainly nothing compared to what I've seen in larger communities. I suspect the larger the community, the worse the garbage.

But the main reason I say commercial players have made it worse is that they've also commercialized content moderation. Which is to say, they employ people to sit at a desk looking at the absolute worst humanity has to offer for 8 straight hours a day for barely better than minimum wage. That's like a job straight out of Black Mirror.

Forum moderation, by contrast, was/is a volunteer position. You were only in it for as long as you chose to be, and you could leave at any time without any effect on your livelihood.

So I'd argue the "community watch" model of amateur forum moderators was closer to the greater good than the commercial walled gardens.

They've made some things better, and some things worse. Which I think was the point.

"mindbogglingly huge" is an incredible overstatement. It's not easy to deal with malicious e-mails, but it's also not some unattainable end-goal that only a huge corporation can achieve. A single very motivated person can do it with significant effort, or a small team (3-4) people can do it with average effort (in the setup phase. Maintenance is a 1-2 people affair, and not even fulltime).