I think a lot of the nostalgia is a result of being uncomfortable dealing with people now being the "insiders" rather than the users. It's much easier to call out the new generation of users or large companies and praise old things than actually creating something relevant for today.
I've played around with creating a relevant version of things like usenet, but at the end of the day it wasn't something I wanted to work on. A large part of the work is correcting for flaws of the Internet that most "hackers" won't recognize. And while you could certainly overcome those problems, I don't think the end result would be worth it. Much of the "hacker crowd" these days aren't, in my opinion, motivated by naive curiosity and shallow idealism (like it used to be), but forced nativity to further their own interests and a opinionated demeanor. That's why many of these alternative services don't work out. Because they aren't motivated by creating something that is nice to use, but to satisfy the convoluted criteria of the creators.
I've played around with creating a relevant version of things like usenet, but at the end of the day it wasn't something I wanted to work on. A large part of the work is correcting for flaws of the Internet that most "hackers" won't recognize. And while you could certainly overcome those problems, I don't think the end result would be worth it. Much of the "hacker crowd" these days aren't, in my opinion, motivated by naive curiosity and shallow idealism (like it used to be), but forced nativity to further their own interests and a opinionated demeanor. That's why many of these alternative services don't work out. Because they aren't motivated by creating something that is nice to use, but to satisfy the convoluted criteria of the creators.