Difference between Usenet and forums in terms of servers?

Question

I tried to understand the true difference between Usenet and regular forums in termas of servers adminstrations and organizing but with no avail.

This is qutoed from Wikipedia "absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another in so-called news feeds"

Two things are here:

1- "Absence of Central Server". I would say that's also the case in large forums. There are no one central server, but a group of servers.

2- "No dedicated Admin". How is this possible? I mean there must be someone/group who takes care of the whole thing. Especially that files are being hosted on these servers and not on users PCs. I mean in case of torrents, "No admin" would be acceptable as files are hosted on users PCs. But not in our case here.

Question: What is the true difference in terms of servers organizing, in a liitle bit of details?

Answer 1

Here's a simplistic explanation.

Usenet is like a distributed bulletin board system. Messages are stored in news servers worldwide, and each server hosts several newsgroups, which are discussion groups devoted to a special topic. Users post and fetch messages to newsgroups using news readers. Messages are exchanged between users and news servers - and distributed from a news server to another - via the NNTP protocol.

Usenet has no centralized authority just like the World Wide Web has no centralized authority; single webservers and websites may be administered by different organizations, but nobody controls the Web as a whole. Just like the Web is the worldwide network of webservers accessed via HTTP/HTTPS, Usenet is the worldwide network of news servers accessed via NNTP.

On the other hand, a forum is an online discussion site implemented on a specific webserver using a specific software (see here for a list). As such, each forum has its own admins and users.