I still have an account. It is still useful for grabbing binary content like TV shows and movies, but that takes a lot of setup.

What I really miss are the discussions. There, it’s not as useful as it once was. All the groups still exist, but many are overrun by spam. It would be nice to see a solution that makes USENET actually useful again.

This might not be the official answer, but it feels like the right answer.

USENET. Actually useful USENET.

It’s not about allowing a single instance to own the name. The name would belong to the federation in a global namespace.

A possible scenario is to define multiple namespaces. Each namespace can be local to a single instance, or shared between many. Within each namespace, a single community name is unique.

In this model, each instance would have a namespace that it owns, and the ability to participate in many others.

The trick is in how we name the namespaces and communities. We could do this the USENET way and do something like <namespace>.<community>, so beehaw.gaming vs. global.gaming. There are other models that could work too.

Signed up, downloaded, launched.

Nice work. I’ve been using Mlem. It’s been working fine for me, but I’m eager to try out other apps!