Usenet (via NNTP) was pretty widespread at one point, and is akin to a federated/distributed Reddit. So I don't see why it couldn't technically work now. But you have to find a way to drive up adoption to hit a sufficient level of users and hosts.
As a discussion system, it's pretty much defunct at this point.
It's pretty much fine as a discussion forum.
Things have been lively in comp.lang.c recently with a little coding exercise going on and such.
comp.unix.programmer and comp.unix.shell are active also.
comp.theory has been quite active due to a crackpot who insists that he has solved the halting problem, or at least refuted common halting proofs using a nested x86 simulator that detects recursion, haha.