I have been wondering why Usenet and IRC haven't experienced a resurgence. Discord will be the next casualty of corporate greed. It's really a fallacy that these communities are moving to yet another corporate-controlled entity.

IRC has been heavily wounded by the Freenode implosion, which was for a while the last big public IRC network. I think a lot of types of people who would once have promoted IRC over Discord are now on Matrix instead as a result.

Usenet requires special software and often subscriptions, whereas Reddit doesn't.

Discord and Slack are just IRC with a bunch more features. The IRC protocol just stagnated and never improved (because it's a function of it's time). I believe there was talk of a new version with more features, but that honestly defeats the purpose of IRC: its simplicity. All of these modern protocols have more complexity built into them because that's what the average user expects.

But yeah, the fall of Discord is coming. The enshitification process has begun. Their forcing users to use unique usernames still baffles me.

Unfortunately, I think it's just because there is no single organization pushing it. One that would be the recognizable brand, one that would engage in marketing, and spend time and effort streamlining onboarding.

There were in the past - Slack basically bootstrapped itself off the back of techies, with the IRC transport making Slack seem like a prettier IRC... only to shut down the IRC transport once they've entrenched themselves on the market.

Doesn't the usenet have a spam problem?

It did back in the 2000s when it was popular. But even then it wasn't hard to use clientside filters/killfiles to get rid of spam. 15 years of being dead have resulted in usenet having a pretty good signal to noise ratio. If it becomes popular enough to have that problem again I'll be happy.

Scaling by making a huge numbers of copies. Basically a blockchain and similarly efficient.

If we're ranking needless waste, this is not worse than modern websites delivering JS over CDNs. In theory this should be a net win - everyone having all the scripts cached locally, or on a nearby static host. In practice, with CI/CD being the norm, you have to reload all the JS every other refresh, because someone changed something - and so do all the CDNs and all other users.

Ok, what website do I go to to get this Usenet thing?

Google used to have Google Groups which was the Usenet groups but web-based.

Usenet was created before the web was created so you can use a newsgroups app to access it if you don't want to use Google Groups.

I've only seen usenet clients stuck in the past. A bit like RSS and IRC. Quite the reminder how lucky we are with the success of web browsers. Email made it something like 1/4 of the way which is still nice.

The functionality of the www also changed quite a bit over the years. If we could do the same with the other clients and protocols it would be quite the something.

edit: How is it that all desktop apps had to morph into web based apps while with phone apps it is the other way around? It cant both be right.