Every ISP I used a decade or two ago had its own Usenet server.
No ISP I have used in recent years does. They have all been switched off, with the ISP citing low levels of use.
It's hard to blame them, with modern Web-based discussion forums able to do better in almost every way, but that's a lot of freely available information and insight about a lot of subjects that is being consigned to history. Maybe one of the official national libraries is at least keeping an archive of old Usenet content, though I'm not aware that any of them is (at least, not making the archive publicly available at present).
In the mid 90s the only reason that I wanted internet access was for usenet. The web felt insignificant compared to the information available on usenet. It did not matter the topic, there was a discussion group for it. Web sites and services slowly started to move me away from reading Usenet to the point today where I check posts maybe three times per year.
For the heck of it, I just fired up tin to see how many posts since I read last:
1 3866 alt.folklore.computers Stories & anecdotes about computers (some true!).
2 151 alt.hacker No description.
3 1951 alt.obituaries Notices of dead folks.
4 13 comp.graphics.algorithms Algorithms used in producing computer graphics.
5 5021 comp.lang.c Discussion about C.
6 17 comp.os.linux.hardware Hardware compatibility with the Linux operating system.
7 1 comp.os.linux.setup Linux installation and system administration.
8 30 comp.sys.hp48 Hewlett-Packard's HP48 and HP28 calculators.
9 comp.unix.misc Various topics that don't fit other groups.
10 501 comp.unix.programmer Q&A for people programming under Unix.
11 1 comp.unix.questions UNIX neophytes group.
12 1190 comp.unix.shell Using and programming the Unix shell.
13 comp.unix.admin Administering a Unix-based system.
14 465 comp.misc General topics about computers not covered elsewhere.
15 138 rec.games.roguelike.nethack The computer game Nethack.
16 4001 comp.lang.python The Python computer language.
17 2119 comp.sys.raspberry-pi Raspberry Pi computers & related hardware and software.
18 8 alt.sources Alternative source code, unmoderated. Caveat Emptor.
I could imagine accessing terminals in System Shock or Deus Ex and just reading a few lines of those descriptions to show what kind of thing the owner was interested in.
The old internet truly is a window into a different world.
> No ISP I have used in recent years does. They have all been switched off, with the ISP citing low levels of use.
The event that lead to a lot of ISPs dropping their NNTP service was when Andrew Cuomo, when he was the attorney general of New York, made a deal with several ISPs to block access to child porn[1].
That, and the fact that the bulk of Usenet traffic is encoded binaries of copyrighted media and porn of varying levels of legality. The amount of traffic in the "big 7" hierarchy (like comp.*) is tiny compared to that.
I never got how this works. All of those encrypted binaries can only be decrypted using keys posted to private invite-only forums/groups. What's the point in making that extra detour through "binary usenet providers" compared to just having a private tracker?
Secondarily, you need to find a person to seed a private tracker, and bandwidth is limited to the seed host. You pay to share the content. With the binary server, it's the speed of the NNTP host. Users pay to download the content.
Last time I used an actual usenet group must have been around 2000 or so.
I have no idea how I'd set up NNTP and get to a group now. Not that it wouldn't take me long to work it out, but I'd have to start from first principles.
In the late '90s up through 2010 or so, one's ISP would provide instructions for configuring one's mail and news clients to access their email and usenet. From there, the client would show a list of groups and you could choose which ones to subscribe to.
