If its dead, is there a successor?
The Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles (aka netnews), as well as transferring news among news servers.
NNTP isn't dead. It just smells funny.
Sadly, these days if you want to follow 10 different forums then you need to have 10 different accounts and learn 10 different UIs. I like being able to pick the newsreader that I like and have the same interface for all of my newsgroups. OpenID may bring some of this back, but I'm afraid that the "new internet" just doesn't care about interoperability like the "old internet" did.