people have taken the foundations of his OS and ran with it making equally interesting operating systems.

Do you have some examples? I'm curious

Yes, here's my understanding:

it's essentially a massive collection of forum posts -- all text.

Files/binaries are encoded into text, and split into multiple posts if they exceed the max size for a single post. The names of posts and relationships between multiple posts can be obfuscated too.

Indexers provide .nzb files which are kinda like .torrent files, they indicate where in Usenet all the posts needed for a complete download are located.

You give an .nzb file to an nzb downloader, which finds the post(s), downloads, (merges,) decodes the final result into its original binary form, and does a hash check to make sure everything is correct.

There's some open source software like Radarr, for example, which can automate the entire process start to finish (in Radarr's case, for movies specifically)

With Radarr it goes like this: Add movie -> Radarr searches via indexer(s) for a .nzb matching the criteria -> .nzb gets sent to nzb downloader -> downloaded from usenet server(s) -> completed download is moved (and optionally renamed) by Radarr to desired location

Unless, of course, they add it months after release drastically limiting your chances of refunding (looking at you EA WRC 2024 😡)

Half the voting population, more specifically

Or I guess in this case, half of those polled

A client that is basically a ripoff of Telegram would be ideal for me, for what it's worth

Main features I like are replies, reactions to messages (also double tap to react with a default emoji), and that view where you can open a chain of replies like it's its own conversation (I'm assuming this is what is meant by "threading"/"threads")

Lastly, maybe the uncompressed and compressed photo/video options if that's not already a thing

If it had the above I would probably like Discord style too