Still a fan of NNTP... thinking of doing something similar with HTTP and Cloudflare workers (and adjacent service). Durable Objects for incrementing counters per group, and R2 for header/body storage. Not inherently distributed to separate servers, but an open enough API that it would be similar and allow for other implementations. Only thinking CF, in that I wouldn't have the issues of trying to self-scale in the same way something that could be simple if it gained wider usage.