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My understanding is that the client isn't the technical challenge, it's the (federated) servers, and it's more of a business challenge. In particular, "who pays

My understanding is that the client isn't the technical challenge, it's the (federated) servers, and it's more of a business challenge. In particular, "who pays for them." Usenet servers used to be something ISPs maintained & your ISP subscription would include (usually) a certain number of hours of internet access per month, an email account, access to USENET and perhaps a couple other things. As it fell out of favor in the mainstream ISPs stopped supporting it/paying for it & it became a niche service to pay for separately, if I understand correctly, and the only people willing to pay (by and large) are people sharing pirated software, media, etc.

Symbiote 7y ago
For a while, I used a commercial NNTP service which was free for text-only newsgroup access. I think I stopped once I started university, as there were better distractions. With a quick look on a partial NNTP server (requires registration), the only groups I used to look at that are still active is the old/retro computer one. Most of the posts are people still using these computers day-to-day, and finding problems with Javascript-heavy websites or outdated encryption. https://dotsrc.org/usenet https://dotsrc.org/usenet