I think the modern centralization tendency is a bad thing.
If I was going to redesign usenet today ...?
1. You want non-repudiability in transactions: a given user owns their posts or cancel messages and can be linked to them. So, use a blockchain-based solution for authentication. (Not bitcoin; a separate non-financialized system.)
2. Instead of local spools consisting of a directory tree and sync'd via flood-fill, implement it as a virtual filesystem, peer-to-peer discovery, locally requested contents are cached, so high-traffic newsgroups will be cached more widely and therefore be faster to load.
3. Anti-spam: a big problem is preventing spammers sprouting new sock-puppet identities to get around already-imposed blocks. Hence non-repudiability. I'm not sure how to go about enforcing limits on sock-puppeting: this is a hard problem. But if the authentication mechanism is blockchain based we might be able to link it to an underlying funding system and thereby impose a monetary cost on posting -- even $0.01 per message should be enough to put a drag-brake on spamming. This was always the weakness of usenet: spammers externalized all their costs.
If I was going to redesign usenet today ...?
1. You want non-repudiability in transactions: a given user owns their posts or cancel messages and can be linked to them. So, use a blockchain-based solution for authentication. (Not bitcoin; a separate non-financialized system.)
2. Instead of local spools consisting of a directory tree and sync'd via flood-fill, implement it as a virtual filesystem, peer-to-peer discovery, locally requested contents are cached, so high-traffic newsgroups will be cached more widely and therefore be faster to load.
3. Anti-spam: a big problem is preventing spammers sprouting new sock-puppet identities to get around already-imposed blocks. Hence non-repudiability. I'm not sure how to go about enforcing limits on sock-puppeting: this is a hard problem. But if the authentication mechanism is blockchain based we might be able to link it to an underlying funding system and thereby impose a monetary cost on posting -- even $0.01 per message should be enough to put a drag-brake on spamming. This was always the weakness of usenet: spammers externalized all their costs.