I don't think there's much life on Usenet anymore, regretably.
I disagree. I think some newsgroups have waned, but there seems to be plenty of traffic on many of my old haunts.
I still follow a small number of newsgroups. The trick always was finding groups with an acceptable S/N ratio.
I always admired usenet because it let a single, user-selected UI preside over a great series of msg boards, relative to the web boards that have come to dominate.
But then my fav group rec.games.video.classic kind of petered out. Also, I was at a job w/ a firewall that mean I couldn't check in over lunch.