There a lot of benefits that Usenet provides in general to the community. The variety of subjects and topics range in the thousands. Activity in one group alone can surpass hundreds of thousands of posts. It is in the way that the system supports its community however, that makes it much more powerful than anything on the internet today.

The reason for this is that Usenet is truly a community built network and foundation. Designed specifically to bring together a global community drawn by the similar interests they share.

Internet bulletin boards, forums and other social networking sites are very similar to the Usenet foundation. Taking many aspects of the Usenet service and integrating them into the internet equivalent.

In these modern times, a push is moving forward in order to integrate what Usenet has had an advantage of all along – being able to subscribe to similar topic communities – all by use of different forms of one universal ID.

Google and OpenID being the most prominent, trailblazing this endeavor by allowing users to participate in other communities with the same username and password to the other sites.

Usenet has been capable of this all along. For example, if you’re into technology, it is incredibly much simpler to subscribe and follow messages on multiple newsgroups on the matter. Replying or creating a new message for these new groups is much easier than the internet alternative. With a good Newsreader, it takes all of five minutes for the moderately knowledgeable Usenet user to post their message to multiple groups.

Responses are much easier as well, allowing you with ease to subscribe to replies and messages that are sent to your inbox at intervals at you’re choosing.

Even with an OpenID or Google account, you are still required to copy your message you placed on one group, search for another similar topic forum or site (that supports this ID service as well) and repeat the process again. After posting the message to each site, you then still in many cases have to check your settings with each site to configure how you wish to receive replies – if they have any at all on some.

Usenet has had this feature since its inception. A notable mark of the foresight to address the same obstacles that the internet is now responding to.

Usenet has been and continues to lead the world in bringing communities together in ways that the internet has yet to find a solution for. Maybe that’s why Usenet is one of the oldest and the largest community network in the world.