yeti Well back in the day my newsreader used to be forte agent, later pan and these days it would extremely likely (huge understatement here) be sylpheed. The problem with usenet in it's oldschool form is sadly that it's pretty much like email - a protocol designed in and for a whole different "internet universe" with the biggest difference being that email was considered so integral (it's pretty much the lowest common denominator when it comes to internet communication and reaching even close to a global agreement on changing to something else is full on impossible) that people piled hacks on top of hacks just to keep it "somewhat" working. NNTP didn't get that treatment (and doesn't deserve to).
Don't get me wrong i am very much the last person to hate on something as iconic as Usenet but in todays internet landscape it will mostly attract very finite groups of people and while i am not saying that has to be entirely bad, calling the possibility of a reemergence of Usenet as a global medium highly unlikely is still most certainly quite overoptimistic (not implying you actually expect it to come back with a bang in any way). Even if it did, it would have to go the way of email (hello funky headers, hello cryptic DNS records, hello overaggressive filters and so on) just to keep it usable.
The way i see it is that the best that could happen to Usenet is for someone to come around and redesign the underlying concepts while keeping NNTP between the client and the "server" (or more probably the local node). Usenet has a ton of very useful and capable clients/tools that would just continue to work as long as they can continue talking NNTP. What happens beyond that doesn't bother them, so the messages might as well end up in a decentralized datastore.
Sure there would be quite a couple of tough nuts to crack on how to organize all of this but i have a feeling most of the puzzle pieces are already there. "control messages" could piggyback on some blockchain to establish kind of a "control tree structure" while nodes could use mining hashes as form of micropayments (for storage, retrieval, maybe routing and so on - probably still quite tough to calibrate for strong adversaries, i admit) to keep abuse at bay (while not requiring the user to actively touch anything "crypto" at all). All of this could be glued on top of some anonymizing network like i2p (or something similar - there is quite a bit of options these days it seems but i am badly out of date here) and with the datastore anonymized (like freenet or 2 decades back stop1984's entropy) it could end up becoming a decentralized, self governing and censorship resistant communication platform.
Just think how cool it would be. In my opinion it even fits the spirit of the "old" (un- or at least way less regulated) internet. In any case i would be SO rushing to use this and i think in a world where a proprietary service like Telegram is actually already kinda portrayed as "uncensored/bulletproof" (obviously it's neither) there might even be a real niche for something like this. Imagine people who have never experienced much of anything beyond [insert-list-of-social-media-giants-here] rushing to install some NNTP app on their phones. It would be so massively surreal and, well, all it really takes is someone to figure out the details and hack in some code 😉
OK, enough of the rambling pipe dreams... Whoever actually read all of what i just wrote has my honest respect!