Usenet also largely became a venue for bootlegging and porn -- and due to the nature of the protocol, companies hosting Usenet services didn't want to have to store all of that shit. After about 1995, you didn't go there for discussion anymore. Eternal September messed it up. Lemmy is fortunate that you can't really use it for file sharing, a few images notwithstanding, or the same thing would happen.

It should be emphasized, the above list is accurate for Social Interaction as the discussions and text have indeed waned. It does mention that at the end, but still.

For media sharing specifically, many of those above items are either trivial OR are actually what helps it thrive. Somehow, 30 years later, we're still under the radar and maxing out connection speeds without having to VPN, seed, share or dodge ISP rules and DMCA requests.

Nntp is easy to set up and run.

There's a webUI and a forum front-end for nntp.

Nntp is as well-known as MC files (if you need to. You know).

An internal slack is as exclusive.

Email<->nntp gateways exist. What's easier than email ?