Google Groups ending support for Usenet

Guess it's hard to get others sync with you?

Why haven't you asked why I have recast "nazi" into meaning

>A person who is perceived to be authoritarian, autocratic, or inflexible; one who seeks to impose his or her views upon others[0]?

I am not working to recast anything. You conflated a moral argument that one should not use words that reference Nazism in any way with a factual evaluation of the meaning of the word necessarily being the object of that reference. Had you said "the usage of 'brownshirt' to mean 'one who abuses power' is not considered appropriate" that would be a different matter. What you said, however, is factually wrong; there is no equivalence being made between Nazism and "content moderation." That is to say, you should have said that the second definition is not appropriate, instead of denying it's existence to then change the meaning of the sentence such that it is then equating content moderation on private platforms with Nazism. Unless by "equating" you meant "to make comparable" where "comparable" means "an examination of two or more items to establish similarities and dissimilarities." I should mention that Oxford does not have "comparable" in "equating" and the definition of comparable above is almost certainly not what is meant by "equating" in any event.

I personally have never used "brownshirt" to mean "authoritarian." My motivation for my initial post was to show you with a simple double-meaning comment that words can have multiple meanings.

[0] https://oed.com/search/advanced/Meanings?textTermText0=nazi&...

see also: https://merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Nazi

https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=nazi

That's got you play the metrics game.

The principle use-case for Usenet has always been small, controlled-access networks.

That's what ARPANET and the early Internet were, where "small" meant The Matrix (1990):

https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/page/24...>

Spinning up an NNTP group for internal company communications, for a family group, or for a (sufficently tech-savvy) organisation or hobby group would be a viable option. My experience is that peak group experience tends to occur with somewhere between about 5 and maybe 1,000 participants on the high end, and that's being generous. In practice, 5--50 is probably a better sweet spot.

The technology isn't the stumbling point nearly so much as convincing people to use the service. In some industries, privacy and disclosure rules may preempt usage (e.g., healthcare, finance). And the fact that Usenet has no intrinsic authentication or attestation of identity (though these can be provided by additional mechanisms such as PGP/GPG signatures) means that publicly accessible newsgroups are likely to be nonviable given malicious actors.

What's underappreciated about much of the early Internet / online world is how small most of the "large" (as in influential) groups or movements were. Usenet, the WELL, Slashdot, and early blogging had core groups of perhaps a few hundred to a few thousand people, possibly fewer. Yes, there were additional participants in many cases, but in terms of how concentrated the bulk of activity was, small.

Text-only Usenet shouldn't cost much to host and operate, and close to nothing if rethought to be distributed serverless p2p style, possibly encrypted. I was used in the past to wait ~3 days for my Fidonet post and their replies round trips, I don't think many people would mind waiting a few minutes for their local msg base to sync with the distributed cloud.