I don't think the OP actually used Usenet back in the day.

The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995. The comp.* hierarchy was rather good and that's where the action was.

I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers simply copied the phpBB ideas because they've never seen anything better. So now we have to live with those "forums" where you can't find anything, and you have to wade through screenfuls of decoration just to see any content at all.

What was also really good was that you had a single interface for accessing multiple groups. That's something we lost: if I have multiple interests today, I have to register for multiple "boards/forums", each one with different software, and I have to go around and check them all for new posts. That quickly gets problematic and tedious if you are interested in more than two things.

I have a nagging feeling that we've dumbed things down terribly.

I still stubbornly hope that one of these silicone valley boys will "invent" USENET, and package it up nicely for the masses. That'd be cool.

README:

DFeed is:

    an NNTP client
    a mailing list archive
    a forum-like web interface
    an ATOM aggregator
    an IRC bot