Another thing we lost, that we're just rediscovering with the kneecapping of Reddit and Twitter, is that Usenet was decentralized by design. Feed goes down or has problems? Get it from somewhere else.

It was very much not perfect, though. Spam, hoaxes, and general crap abounded, and moderation was all-or-nothing and iffy at best. Hopefully, the ActivityPub world can avoid some of Usenet's mistakes and get us out of the single-point-of-failure model.