renaissance poisson

Yeah, I got what I wanted out of Usenet via That Hierarchy, which has that complete topic freedom (threads sometimes move into vaguely more appropriate groups and they generally start in some group relevant to the original message, but that's about it and there's a *.general group). It's really about the collection of people rather than the topic, and that works great. I post probably as much to That Hierarchy as I used to post to Usenet proper except in areas where I wasn't just posting for fun and instead was playing some sort of role.

I don't think the set of people meets the set of people you really want to talk with, though. It's a bunch of sysadmins and related technical people mostly geeking about computers, and while that's fun, there's a certain breadth of discourse that's a bit lacking (and which I personally get from chatservers).

Also, it's as healthy as it is because it's closed and you have to know someone to get access.