Usenet was great. A distributed database with varied and robust communications links and sophisticated replication and de-duplication features; long before anyone thought to see it that way. Persistent compression dictionaries, indexes, and query passing could have happened too.

They are all still exist, although not used as much as it should be in my opinion. There is Usenet spam today, although in my experience, most of it comes from Google Groups (although there are good messages from Google Groups too); I have not seen spam coming from other servers (there probably used to be a lot more from other servers, I suppose).

gopher is not dead and it has evolved into the gemini protocol https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

BBS are alive and well in the communities of the tildeverse https://tildeverse.org/

More like evolved, the Pubnix/SDF guys took it and it created something similar but privacy being mandatory with SSL.

On BBS', ssh/telnet synchro.net or gopher cvs.synchro.net.

People is alive and posting well. Ditto with usenet.