I think usenet users are a vocal minority.
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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It used to be the opposite. But the normies showed up and the fight club rules are out the window.
I have no idea what to do or how to even get started with Usenet, so I just use a VPN and torrent as needed.
I am also in that basket. To me Usenet seems like another, older protocol that achieves practically the same thing. If someone is more knowledgeble, feel free to correct me or explain further.
Usenet as daily driver works 99% of the time. Only use VPN/torrents for extremely new or very obscure shows. $5/month pays for unlimited Usenet and VPN.
5$ for vpn and usenet? where can one hypothetically get this?
This UsenetServer discount link gives you 1 trial month for $1, then $50/year after that, and includes a 1TB TweakNews block and a paid PrivadoVPN account.
Just want to let you know that Privado VPN is not a private vpn, please read their privacy policy before buying into their services.
Looks ok to me, what in particular do you take issue with?
This was discussed on reddit a bit ago. The same company in place now ran IPVanish and they logged and rolled over on the user. No reason to think they wouldnt do the same with privado and if you are ultra worried tin foil hat-ish, would they do the same with their usenet? who knows. https://torrentfreak.com/ipvanish-no-logging-vpn-led-homeland-security-to-comcast-user-180505/
Good to know I guess, but yea that's a bit too speculative for my taste.
yes seems silly they would do it for usenet but i would have said the same thing a few years ago about vpn. i guess things are fine until they arent.. my main surprise in the vpn case was their willingness to work with the feds. they told them once we dont have anything and then THEY contacted the feds and said hey, ask again why dont you.
Only use VPN/torrents for extremely new or very obscure shows
Interesting, I would have thought torrents would be better for older stuff due to their theoretically infinite retention. Like, can you find, say, LOTR: The Return of the King on Usenet at the moment? Someone has to have uploaded it in the past ~2 years (retention period) or something for it to be available, right?
Afaik most usenet providers have a retention period of 3000+ days (some even reaching 4000+). I've downloaded multiple things from the 90s without any problems. The oldest media in my collection is from 1957, so retention really isn't a problem I would say.
Retention doesnt matter for anything released beyond the retention as it was reuploaded anyway.
I managed to get Thomas and Friends from 1987
LOTR = anything from 4K HDR 7.1 Atmos, down to DVD is available (theoretically, as you can have items that exists, but can’t be fully downloaded so don’t work, because of DMCA and other things). The oldest release I see is 5800 days old and the newest is 4 days old. So people keep reuploading stuff if it’s popular enough. (I still can’t find some episodes of Ben 10 tv show lol)
This comment section may as well be a retirement home
I'm a resident of the retirement home, but this is still funny.
Always went for the free option
Usenet can be as free as torrents though
Could you explain futhrer? I though that usenet was behind a paywall
I have made a bot that gathers accounts on the internet. You can pm if you are interested
I don't even know what Usenet is, so I'm 100% torrents, which I keep seeding ad infinitum as I don't have storage issues. My most-seeded thing is nearing 150 ratio lol
Usenet here. 4 paid indexers and the Usenet sub. Still cost less in a year than cable or streaming services cost in a month. Get everything I want and look for easily.
100% Usenet here. Maybe I am basic, but it has everything I want and grabbing stuff is very easy.
Once in a great while I cannot find something and then I ask a friend to check his private trackers.
YMMV
Torrents only here... I have 8gbps internet. I'm privileged, so I seed (10x or one year). I don't see a point to paying to be part of a usenet in my situation. I have a few private trackers I'm on. I should see about getting into a few more though to spread the bandwidth wealth. 4 seedbox vms to roundrobin the new torrents that get added.
Usenet for 30 years now. Torrent for 15 or so. Usenet primary source.
Soulseek, anyone? I only ever do books and music, and Soulseek has everything I need
I tried it but TBH went back to torrents. I found it to be very fiddly to get working, every single component seems to want you to pay for it (and not wanting to pay for and keep track of half a dozen streaming things is one of the main draws for piracy for me anyway) and overall it just didn't seem worth it to find the ~1% of things I can't find on torrents (and I didn't even find all of them on Usenet either.)
Other people's mileage may vary of course, but I didn't really think it was worth it.
I'm 100% torrents if I need it. Fmovies or other sites seem to have the majority of what I want to watch.
Is there a guide on how to use usenet? What does it offer that torrents does not? Is it nitch stuff?
I used the wiki on r/usenet, which was pretty helpful.
From my understanding, you need 3 things:
- Usenet Provider (these are servers that host all of the content - you pay them to have access to download the content)
- Indexer (this is kind of like Google but for the usenet providers - they will find and give you the .nzb file which will be used to access the content from the usenet provider above - you pay the indexer for their service)
- Usenet client (This would be akin to a torrent client like Qbittorrent - it is the program which you use to download the content from the provider, using the .nzb file provided by the indexer)
Benefits of Usenet I believe are the high speed of downloads, generally accessibility to older and more niche content, and ease of use. You don't need to fish through torrents hoping that the seed/peer numbers are enough to actually get all of the content in good time. I've found a lot of stuff there lately that I have not been able to find via torrenting sites, but are important childhood media to me/my wife.
Usenet is hurt a lot by takedown notices unfortunately. So lots of older popular stuff doesn't work. That said, things like Anime or something that isn't given a takedown seem to be on there about forever. The server speed is a benefit for sure.
I use both. It depends on what I need, really.
I used to when usenet was free from every single ISP, there was an active community behind every single alt.binaries.* group, and it wasn't "subscribe to this usenet provider that gives you 5 years of posts from every group and you download things by this oversimplified NZB crap" instead of relying on and engaging with the community to post new and interesting things all the time.
Just torrents and I seed as much as possible. I knew about Usenet many years ago but, for whatever reasons, never really got into it. One day...
I was an avid Usenet user, until torrents were invented.
I've never needed to go back.
I'm mostly downloading fairly recently released stuff, so there's no shortage of torrents on public trackers.
I also don't want any payment details associated with anything not explicitly legal, so that'd be a further deterrent from Usenet. Sure, I could use crypto, but even that links me to a wallet that might someday be traced back to me, so I'll pass.
Wait, you have to pay for using Usenet?
Yes just like paying for vpn and/or seedbox to safely torrent.
Well since someone has to host the data, someone needs to pay for it :P
It's funny you put it that way, because torrents are based fundamentally on the idea of freely hosting the data so nobody has to pay to access it.
I have wondered this as well. Seems like it is pretty linked.
Tbf, Usenet and indexers are strictly speaking, legal.
Right, but whatever I'm doing on there really isn't.
As a matter of fact my current jurisdiction doesn't even pursue copyright infringements, but I still don't want to be linked to anything commonly seen as shady.
This is incorrect. What you'd are doing while purely downloading is legal.
Bit torrent exposes you to liability not because you are downloading but because you're sharing which courts have decided is distributing/performing, no matter how small the block you upload.
This is not an issue with Usenet.
I pay for one Usenet provider/indexer. I also still use tons of torrent sources.
90% of the time, stuff that I'm monitoring gets downloaded via Usenet for currently airing or rather new shows.
50% of the time when actively looking for stuff from the past 5-10 years I use Usenet, the other half is torrents
90% of stuff older than that, I only find torrents
100% of non-English stiff I get from torrents (I'm subscribed to an English Usenet indexer though, so that tracks).
In short: Why not use both?
Do things on usenet get purged? Would you expect the stuff showing up today to still be accessible in 5-7 years?
Yes, they do!! With torrents, it just takes a single seeder to keep the torrent alive, but Usenet isn't peer to peer - you're downloading stuff from a centralized server(s), and they simply cannot keep everything alive forever.
IMO it's fine though. Usenet provides you with very timely access to all the "newest" stuff, in excellent, very consistent quality.
And for older stuff, there's torrents.