Freenet is very different, it's a free-speech oriented protocol/server which provides a way to publish anonymously/untraceably and have the network host arbitrary content in such a way as you aren't supposed to even be able to tell what data is stored on your own node. Effectively a censorship-resistant and deniable publishing model. I haven't looked into it for nearly two decades now, but when I did it was full of CSAM and I decided I couldn't run a node in good faith.

Usenet was great while it was a niche thing and before the advent of spam. It was distributed in the sense that most ISPs would run a server and they would mirror messages between them. You'd use your mail client to talk to your ISP's server, and messages would be like emails, but threaded somewhat like a forum. Binary files were usually uuencoded and often split across multiple chunks.

Unlike solutions run by centralised entities, it really did feel like a public square, but your ISP could and often did decide which groups they would carry. On the flip-side your ISP or university could carry its own groups which weren't replicated out to the wider internet, for local discussion.

It died for a few reasons but there were a few main reasons and mainest of those (lol) was that spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost, all actual conversation just got drowned out pretty fast.

It had an undeath (maybe still does?) as a way to distribute pirated material, mostly because 'normies' didn't know about it and it would fly under the radar. All the movies on torrent sites would come from groups releasing them on usenet. I guess these particular users weren't affected by spam, and weren't a target for spam because no human was trying to read the groups...