> Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.
Except, unlike Reddit, it wasn't centralized nor owned by a single corporation.
Usenet users did not have to obey the rules and whims of any corporation and there was thriving ecosystem of feature rich, free and open Usenet clients.
I really miss having my own killfiles and regex search abilities that were common on Usenet clients, but is missing from the Reddit clients and its web UI.
ActivityPub is essentially this in "modern" times with "modern" sensibilities (e.g. accounting for low power mobile devices that are going to hold open only a single connection and query for posts.) You can pretty trivially killfile whatever you'd like too. I vibecoded a super basic AP "client" that just speaks AP vocabulary to fetch posts from users I have in a JSON file.