Usenet was here for eons before Facebook, and shall remain long after
the Facebook servers have crumbled to dust. The distributed nature of
Usenet is much better than trusting a corporation like Facebook and
their agenda (i.e. censorship, data mining, etc.). Usenet is just an
awesome working remnant of the "Wild West" days of the internet before
Facebook et al. set up shop.
The one thing that concerns me is the long term preservation of the
Dejanews archive Google bought. This Usenet archive is a goldmine of
old school anime fandom: reading messages from the early 90's on
rec.arts.anime makes for some amazing exploration of the era before
anime went mainstream, and there is just tons of anime related
treasure buried in these postings. However, trusting a private entity
like Google with such a treasure is troubling: Google Groups is not
exactly the biggest money maker for them (as their less than optimal
access to the archive shows), and, as the Yahoo shutdown of Geocities
shows, corporations are not the greatest stewards of net history out
there.
You can download the UTZOO archive of Usenet from 1981-1991 (http://
archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive), but Google still
has much more locked up on their servers. I'm unaware of any other
extensive Usenet archives, so it would be nice if someone could figure
out a way to suck up as much of what Google has as possible (groups
like Archive Team were able to save much of Geocities, so maybe
someone will save this Usenet history too).