this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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Greentext

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's Usenet babe. Get this... it's been around since 1980! Isn't that wild, babe? It just goes to show, if a distribution system isn't broke, don't fix it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Hahah I was gonna come mention Usenet but glad you already did.

A month ago I was frustrated waiting on some torrent and decided to finally give Usenet a try. All I gotta say is - why didn't I do this switch years ago???

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Because they usually cost money

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yearly rates for a provider and 2 indexers still doesn't come close to the cost of all the streaming subscriptions you'd need to have the same library access. Coupled with the ability to use RSS feeds and other homelab services to essentially automate your collection, it's just absolutely worth every penny.

But I wouldn't know firsthand, because I'm a law abiding citizen, and this is all hypothetical. I just read about it on the internet somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

With usenet you're not a distributor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You say that as if it was a plus...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I mean you can be if you want

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Usenet via SSL, with a provider that doesn't log, over torrents any day. The anonymity level, speed, and retention is all worth it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But they still are more expensive than torrents

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

So use torrents and get ridiculed by your date.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Oh yeah true, I kinda forgot about that since I've been so excited with the results :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Shit goes missing after like a year

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

IIRC that might have been the reason I previously disregarded the idea of trying Usenet. However if it's not on Usenet, one can always fall back to torrents :p Haven't had to do that yet. *knocks on wood*

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago
[–] threeganzi 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

What goes missing? ~~You~~ I don’t know how Usenet works.

Edit: edited to say I don’t know instead of you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

The files are not stored indefinitely, retention is based on the provider

[–] MrNobody 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Retention for 90%+ of providers is at least 4500 days for binary files and 110000 days for newsgroups. Have two providers, one monthly and one block, that run on different backbones with one that takes down for dmca and one that doesn't and you'll be fine. There are very very very few shows or movies that you can't get. Don't have to worry about VPN, ratios, trackers or any of that other crap.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

So movies from 2011 and before can not be found?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

That's cool, retention a lot better now than like 10 or 20 years ago

[–] threeganzi 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks! And sorry, I meant to say that I don’t know how Usenet works, not you.

Follow-up question. Why is retention so important? Wouldn’t they get reuploaded again? Or is it mainly a problem for more obscure content.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Torrents persist until all seeders disappear for good, which is rare on private trackers. On usenet generally content is uploaded ASAP upon release and then only lasts as long as rentention. Maybe you'll get rereleases on usenet but it didn't seem to be a common occurance

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How do you get a provider though?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Yeah there was a lot of ~~googling~~ duckduckgoing at first. In my case I decided to start out with NewsHosting as provider and nzbgeek as indexer. So far so good