this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Usenet is a very old part of the internet. I think it predates the world wide web. It's basically a message board. Which boards (like subs) exist on there is democratically decided. At least that was how it was done in Germany. For example, when there where too many Star Wars posts in the Science Fiction group de.rec.sf they decided to create one for Star Wars under de.rec.sf.starwars.
The actual content resides on newsservers around the globe. When you pass a message to one of them it is distributed around the globe to all the other servers. It's similar to how Lemmy works, with the difference that with Lemmy content is only passed around when someone is actually subscribed to a particular community.
But many news servers don't pass around messages that contain files. Because that would take up too much space. To get access to the servers that do pass around files you have to pay for the service. That is actually used for piracy nowadays.
Back in the days you could actually get access to usenet from your ISP. At least to the text only portion. Don't know how you'd do it nowadays. It's mostly fallen to obscurity.
This helped me understand usenet properly, thank you. I don't see the allure of using it especially since torrents are free and largely seeded (depending on the indexer and your preference). I see why people would prefer it for more obscure stuff though.
You don't need a VPN with Usenet. The connection is encrypted. That, and the fact that speeds are dramatically faster make up the difference in cost.
Ah, I'm from a country that doesn't enforce copyright much (at all) so using a VPN has not been a requisite for me, but I see how the speeds could be worth the money.
The main reason it might be used is it integrates very well with services such as Sonarr/Radarr which can auto-download TV shows/movies if you have a good indexer. That and generally the Usenet servers do not keep access logs so it tends to be a lot safer than torrenting. For software/games etc. I would stick with torrents, but for TV/Movies if you have your own server Usenet is a compelling service.
I have used both and I don't disagree with you, but I want to say it's worth noting that torrents also work fine with Sonarr and Radarr!
Good point - I did find torrents a lot more fiddly to set up though.
Agreed again haha, it was way more fiddly (but also more free!)
These days I'm just using Stremio for my media though, with add-ons it's glorious
Free is always the best price! I've been using a Sonarr/SABnzbd/Emby setup on my home built NAS (unRAID) for about 7 years now. Until recently I had about 9.5TB of shows but then got ransomwared :(. Got about 4 of it back now and counting!
Omg that's awful 😱 sorry for your loss
Aside from the other two comments I've heard Usenet is good for more obscure content such as older TV shows that may not be well seeded