I cant help but draw parallels between this and NNTP. This is essentially a really nice skin over newgroups, and thats not a bad thing at all. We have seen just how successful a modern UX can be on a old protocol with slack providing a UX to IRC. It is funny that we are slowly reworking the tools of the early computing community in slick modern ways.

It is also interesting that we as a community have completely sold out federated independent operators with a common standards defined protocol for soloed tooling.

  I cant help but draw parallels between this
  and NNTP. This is essentially a really nice
  skin over newgroups, and thats not a bad
  thing at all.

The people in the D language community[0] came up with just such a thing. The source is on GitHub here[1].

0 - http://forum.dlang.org/

1 - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed