Can the SocialWeb save Google Groups? (or, at least do what it should do?)

As discussed on /.
<https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/08/172217/google-groups-has-been-left-to-die>,
yesterday, Andrew Helwer asked on his blog
<https://ahelwer.ca/post/2023-03-08-google-groups/>: *"Google Groups has
been left to die: Where should the formal methods community move?**"* He
suggests that Google Groups is in decline and that *"It’s clear we ran
afoul of the old lesson: don’t build communities for long-lasting FOSS
projects on proprietary infrastructure you don’t control."*

It seems to me that the kind of discussion groups that started on USENET
and then eventually migrated over to Google Groups are, in fact, "social"
and thus might be usefully included within the scope of this group. (Even
though NNTP is an IETF RFC, not a W3C standard.) In fact, it appears that
one could construct a useful analog to these legacy systems using
ActivityStreams and ActivityPub -- but not the way they are implemented in
Mastodon or most other existing AS/AP systems. It is also quite clear that
using a Federated approach to maintain this kind of discussion might
protect them from the catastrophic loss that arises when a proprietary
system decides to change its priorities.

Is a future for USENET/Google Groups-like social interactions appropriately
discussed here? Can or should the SocialWeb provide a new, more persistent,
home for Helwer's Format Methods Community?

What do you think?

bob wyman