Yes! Its very nice here.

In my recollection the earliest form of centralization and lock-in was the gradual disappearance of Usenet servers, pushed on by widespread adoption of NNTP (and INN), forced by the decline of controls and desire to keep binaries from being posted (which upped the ante to require large bandwidth and even larger storage), with eventually only one or two very large sites that charged a fee even to get an NNTP feed. Now there's just Giganews and unless you're a content provider they don't want to peer with you at all. Apparently they do have non-binary NNTP feeds for peering with content providers though, with maximum article size limited to under 100kB. Last time I bothered to look (a few years ago) the community aspect of Usenet was entirely gone, and had been for years.