Back to USENET (which Reddit is a weird copy of) again, I suppose. The best part about Reddit are the small, topically-focused communities — those are going to have a hard time finding new homes, given how anti-community, anti-user-generated-content, & resistant to discovery (and much of that is on the search engines) most sites are these days.
I never really got in to USENET, being a child trapped in the Prodigy and AOL and CompuServe Internet a little too long, but as an adult who is planning for Reddit to hit the fan, I am unsure of the best way of discovering newsgroups that would interest me. I have a handful of subs that I follow, but I wouldn't know how to find the equivalent of r/homelab.
I would add quickly that I am aware of the ability one would have to discover other kinds of content on USENET, but rule one forbids talking about it. So barring that, what is the best way to discover interesting newsgroups and participate in them?
You can just download the list of newsgroups. If you find one that looks interesting you can just post to it.
The main issue is most unmoderated groups are overrun with spam. Most news readers don't do a great job filtering that spam so for every ham post in a thread there can be dozens of spam messages. There's also effectively no enforcement of any group's etiquette so even ham messages tend to be pretty low quality.
Usenet is just a message distribution mechanism. There's just a lot of small world culture around its management. It started in the era of small world Internet so that's understandable but it's definitely a quirk of the whole structure. You have to know or get to know the right people to start groups or get them carried or manage their moderation.
Usenet isn't really a thing anymore, sadly. Don't get me wrong, it's going strong for file sharing, but most ISPs don't provide access anymore, so it's not really a place you find discussions.
