I've been thinking about this myself. I made some real-world friends from usenet. Not extremely close ones obviously, but I hung out mostly in a ng dedicated to

I've been thinking about this myself. I made some real-world friends from usenet. Not extremely close ones obviously, but I hung out mostly in a ng dedicated to a band (Ween) and when I travelled to see shows, I always had folks to hang out with even if I went alone. During the high days of that group, there were a number of websites dedicated to the band, but usenet was the home (members of the band even showed up now and then). Then one day someone created the first web forum dedicated to it, and it quickly racked up far more users than the newsgroup. The writing was on the wall. I went and created an account but I could not STAND the web forum interfaces at the time - compared to Free Agent with its conversation threading, the web's early discussion forums were a bad, mean joke. But ignorant people for whom internet=www spoke in their legions and it was only a couple years before nobody came to the usenet forum anymore. I briefly got into Delphi Forums at the behest of my first gf and there was one decent place I hung out in for a few years, but looking back, the evolution of right wing ratfucking on the internet was in full swing and the people I had lively debates with in there eventually became (in many cases) Facebook "friends" as we all onboarded there. And there I lingered till 2016. Reddit is circling the drain at this point, even the subs that are dedicated to my own politics have become appalling lowest common denominator echo chambers. I would love to go back to Usenet, much like NYC disco scenesters of the 70s would love to go back to Studio 54, but in both cases, it was a special place and a special time, and now we live here. I wish I had a better answer, but I'm pretty sure that's the answer.