Back in the mists of time, before Facebook, Twitter, and even Google, Internet users got their news from “newsgroups.” These were secretive enclaves accessed from the terminal where anyone could post, read, and reply to loosely related articles and comments. The great thing about newsgroups was that they were completely decentralized with a web of interconnected servers bouncing messages between themselves. Early ISPs would even have their own news servers, creating an early form of CDN, so that their users could have access to a high performing local news cache. You might reasonably question why this was needed for simple text, but by then text had been supplanted by binaries, albeit encoded as text with uuencode, and Usenet became the go-to location for any kind of file.
Remarkably, Usenet still…