A thought prompted by seeing instances growing and struggling to have enough resources. Then and now, people in groups trying to communicate something. Hardware became incredibly faster over decades, storage became incredibly more huge, and software bloat kept pace?
One difference is there’s no organizational hierarchy like there is on Usenet.
Another difference is that you can have fifteen different subs with the same name, confusing everyone, diluting contribution, and spurring multiple reposts of the same content in the “all” feed.
Other than that, it’s similar.
About the second point, it would be neat if “subs” could federate somehow.
One challenge at a time, cuz!
I’m sure it’s in the roadmap, but the devs have all kinds of moderation headaches and other things that are far more important to ‘brew up’ first.
They can and do. Every sub has a unique name.
The complaint is that there isn’t a single entity who gets to decide which sub is the authoritative sub for a topic. Which is a feature, not a bug.
Communities will coalesce around certain subs that work, and they will rise up over the alternatives. We’re just in ego-land-grab mode right now.