Propagation time was never the problem. I ran a major European node in the 90s and our propagation times were in the seconds. We absolutely obsessed about it. O

Propagation time was never the problem. I ran a major European node in the 90s and our propagation times were in the seconds. We absolutely obsessed about it. Only dialup leaf nodes took longer, but that was and remains a feature, not a bug. I've been using NNTP as a Gossip-type protocol for eventually-consistent pub/sub telemetry, monitoring, and notifications between partially-connected nodes in an unstable mesh ever since. Just not in public. Let’s be careful to separate the message protocol from the system it supported. Usenet’s carcinogenic inability to self-regulate at scale arose from the absence of distributed authority and negative feedback loops in the control plane, something we’d aim to build in algebraically and cryptographically if designed today. Alas, VC backing directs most research in this subsector towards systems enabling consumer surveillance.