is usenet still alive?

Eternal September, a popular nntp server, has some statistics on posting done through their server.

http://www.eternal-september.org/postingstats.php

The top 5 newsgroups for May 2023:

it.politica, fr.misc.actualite.covid19, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, it.hobby.fai-da-te, uk.d-i-y

I'm not sure what to make of that (aside from the large Italian/French contingent) but the top 10 includes some normal fare like rec.food.cooking, rec.arts.tv, and rec.bicycles.tech

jll29

Is HN available (e.g. "comp.culture.hn") on USENET? It would be nice to have the Web forum be interoperable with a USENET group.

The pull model (consume based on your topic/activity) of USENET newsgroups fits forum discussions much better than the "visit all pages you care about daily" Web model, IMHO.

ksherlock

There is a hacker news API so somebody could set up an NNTP server with an HN newsgroup. Looks like it's already been done, at least for personal use. If a newsgroup is read-only and only on one NNTP server, does it count as usenet? Is that like the sound of one hand clapping?

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

https://www.npmjs.com/package/hackernews2nntp

https://github.com/gromnitsky/hackernews2nntp

Honorable mention for gwene.org which converts RSS feeds into NNTP and gmane.org that converts mailing lists into NNTP.