Usenet

This was one of my biggest motivations for moving to usenet. I don’t like exposing myself by seeding. I have a giant folder full of copyright notices forwarded by my ISP because of it, and I don’t want to pay for a vpn as it’s far more expensive than usenet and just moves the problem/target to the vpn provider.

But an ssl connection to a usenet server goes unnoticed… Plus WAY faster download speeds, far more consistency in available files, and less spam/garbage content (at least in my experience, anecdotal).

Torrents took anywhere from an hour to multiple days before either completing or giving up and trying a different torrent. And then there’s the seeding process ontop.

NZBs (usenet) take at the very most, 5min to finish or fail, at which point a new one can be tried automatically by sonarr/radarr if it had failed. Requests for media are now pretty much always ready to watch within 25min of requesting, and most of that is waiting for the library scan to trigger (I’m using SAMBA so filesystem updates can’t trigger scans automatically, they’re on a timer instead)

I don’t understand why usenet is a thing. It really liked it in the early days and it was basically like lemmy. Groups for different topics and also federated. Now it’s used to distribute warez but since it wasn’t made for it so stuff has to be base64 encoded and split into pieces…

I think most people don’t realize that Usenet is older than the World Wide Web. It’s still a thing because it wasn’t corporatized like the Web was.

AT&T used to include Usenet access as part of your Internet connection since both Usenet and the Web are on the Internet but they quit doing that some years ago (back in the halcyon days of DSL).