Slightly off-topic, but is there still much NNTP use out there other than piracy related? I was a heavy NNTP user once upon a time, but all the public groups I once used seem to be overrun by spam and private ones seem to have gone in favor of email. I would expect there's a quite a few private servers out there to warrant continual updating in a program like emacs.

I prefer to consume mailing lists via Gmane's NNTP gateway: http://gmane.org/

It's a surprisingly nice experience. You can really easily pull archives, nntp clients tend to handle threading well, etc.

Relevant to this subthread, Gmane's maintainer is also the maintainer of Gnus, so the Gmane web UI is (I'm told) surprisingly familiar for Gnus users.

Sure: I use NNTP for my RSS/Atom feeds and my mailing lists, using the excellent gateways at http://gmane.org/ and http://gwene.org/

I use NNTP to follow a handful of development mailing lists via gmane.org.

Yes! There's a healthy community at comp.misc where we post stuff like this article, and sci.misc where we post non comp stuff. In fact you'll see a healthy correlation between articles posted to Ycombinator that are subsequently posted and discussed on comp.misc and now sci.misc. Good place to get a free Usenet account is Solani.org now that Albasani and AIOE are somewhat over-subscribed.

D development forums are NNTP, although there is a forum as well.

I really prefer the keyboard navigation and all the niceties offered by Thunderbird than the web groups interface, each with its own set of allowed actions, mostly without keyboard navigation.