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Today I discovered Usenet. I'm blown away
Is anyone using Usenet here? I tried it today for the first time and I am surprised as to how consistently fast downloads are compared to other means. The difference is unbelievable. I am not familiar with how it works yet but I must say I am impressed and worth the few bucks it costs.
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How does usenet work? I see it every once and awhile, but I don't click it, because I thought it was a scam. I'm stuck in the torrent era.
Me too basically. But I read a bit about it and the benefits compared to torrents (fast speeds and the lack of need to seed) so I decided to give it a try. I got an account with NewsHosting which was recommended by many (it was 5-6/mo) and as indexer I got an account with NzbGeek (it was a small amount for 6 months). It works like a charm!
You can probably find lots of info on /r/usenet.
I remember this from another LET post:
Oh, sweet summer child!
Us old timers remember when a good local Usenet cache was included in what you paid for a good ISP. If you had a bad ISP it was worth paying extra for access to a good cache elsewhere. There was a time, a longer time than many remember, even after the web became a thing, during which it was the best place by far to get information about most subjects, or interact with people with specific interests.
Thus speaks an old regular of some groups in comp.lang.*, comp.os.*, alt.fan.*, ...
I am not that young actually, I'm 42 so I have used computers since a while ago and I remember to have heard of usenet before, but sadly I never looked into it.
I have used USENET for years, it was at its peak in 2005 > 2015 and the index was great with mostly 100% healthy NZBs. It has gotten worse in recent times but you won't ever be disappointed in speeds. I used to download PC games and crack them into virtual DVD drives to trick PCs that a physical disk was present. I also taught my dad how to do it with his first-ever PC, I think he was the only person in the UK that could download, repair and burn dvd's but didn't know how to send an email. Good times.
The usenet speeds are always nice, but nothing beats a well tuned torrent setup.
For me torrents are hit and miss, and the download speeds are unstable.
Oh god that takes me back. FBI still baiting people over there? I remember it being packed with pedos back in the day, just right there in the open not even trying to hide.
Touché.
Since it’s a paid service most likely, you may just subscribe to debrid services and get torrents in blazing fast speeds instead.
A well tuned setup utilizing both is the way to go.
Do you still have to join all the pieces together? Reminds me of the 0Day Warez where you had tons of rar files (.r01,.r02,.r03.......). Screw that lol
If you have a slow torrent then adding some middleman won't make it any faster, because it's not the middleman that's the weak link.
It will depend on the content you want and its age, but generally speaking Usenet is nothing special when compared to torrents:
If it works for you, great. But maybe you did not put too much effort in understanding the torrent ecosystem. If you care about ridiculously fast speeds, private trackers can offer you peers with a combined, real available bandwidth of tens if not hundreds of gbps for any popular release.
Agree. Exception is someone already tried downloading it and the provider already has it cached (which they often do) and then we can get it instantly.
Torrents have their downsides too.
Personally, I use both, because there's no reason not to.
I never got deep into them, but weren't Usenets newsgroups that were sort of like forums? I remember people discussing things. And I don't remember paying anything for downloads (talking late 90s~early 00s). Now it just looks like a big paid repository.
I now download something only once every few years, so I don't subscribe to monthly accounts and instead buy credits as needed from BlockNews (they don't expire). In 2012, $4.50 bought me 10GB. In 2019, $3.99 bought me 100GB during a Holiday Sale. My credits are still there on my account.
That's how I used to know and use them.
Parents of forums, grandparents of social networks.
There were some very cool local and global groups.
Then people moved over to forums.
Now they're (almost) all on social networks.
It's worse, IMO. Now it's all about using some NZB search engine and downloading the NZB file and some sort of NZB downloader or whatnot. I end up having to relearn the whole system every time I try to find something. RAR files were easier!
I've used Usenet since the infancy of the web, and, today, I would tell my younger self not to bother. You'll need at least one decent service provider and then a paid indexer to find the good content because it is often obfuscated. Premium content is often DMCA'ed (removed) within 24 hours of it being posted including the obfuscated stuff, so you'll need automation to grab it as soon as it becomes available. Service providers have been selling out to the big daddy (Omicron) over the last few years, and prices are creeping upward. You are better off putting your money towards a torrent-friendly VPN or seedbox IMHO.
I'm so old I actually remember using dial up and you had to dial a different number to get to the usenet servers.
Back then it was all irc and usenet, www was just a mess of animated gifs with no real content.
I suggest the admin to ban whoever told @vitobotta about usenet.
I've occasionally used Usenet for obscure music. There's albums I'd buy but I can't find for sale anywhere (even on Discogs and eBay), and torrents don't exist or are dead (0 seeds and 0 peers). If I find those albums on Usenet, the download almost always works, even if the post is close to 10 years old.
Amazingly, Soulseek (which was created around the same time as LimeWire) is still around and is the best place to find even more obscure music that isn't even in torrents or Usenet.
Everything is automated now though, so IMO it's still a lot easier now. I think most people use NZBHydra and Sabnzbd, searching in Hydra then clicking a button to send the nzb to sabnzbd.
Can you explain what you mean by this if it's a better setup?> @dahartigan said:
Can you describe what you mean by well tuned torrent setup?> @niknar1900 said:
The download client I use. nzbget, does it automatically.> @Nyr said:
If I can achieve better speeds with torrents I am interested in learning more
I've been using soulseek since for as long as I can remember, it's great. I have nearly 2TB of 320kbps mp3's, most downloaded through soulseek. It is unbelievable that it's still going.
This is basically just warez isn't it? With some additional hoops
The good private trackers require a little bit of effort to join or you can try to get invites from other users.
only if we say it is, i think. It's not illegal to download in most jurisdictions as long as you have a right (licence) to have a digital copy. Of course, I have CD copies of all the music I download
this explains it all.
usenet is from another time well passed..
I will not be surprised if OP finds IRC and XDCC tomorrow and "blown" by it