Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Usenet was originally intended for sharing information but then it moved into being sort of the first social media platform then it kind of transitioned back into being mostly used for file sharing.

I can totally saturate my 1 gig internet connection with Usenet. Can download at incredible speeds. No need to ever upload. No logs of what I download. Almost instant access.

You need an indexer and you need a provider. Then you use sabnzbd to queue up what you want to download. It’s not free but depending on how much you plan to download, it’s a bargain.

For indexers I suggest drunkenslug or nzbplanet. For a provider I suggest NewsDemon or Usenet.farm. They are both good independent providers who have helped Usenet stay alive and not succumb to corporate greed.

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.

Usenet WAS basically the internet back in the early to mid 90s,they are also called list servers, that's basically what they are.

You post to a list by topic and it appends your post to the list. It's like reddit in that there are topics and subjects but the list just goes on forever.

Each post will have your subject line and other header info and the software will let you reply and quote and so on.

The key is that it isn't very centralized, servers will copy the lists and host their own. The cool thing was it would let you post binaries. So piracy and pr0n on the internet was here b4 websites were really a thing.

There are a lot of list servers out there but my understanding is that the good ones are a subscription now.

Everything old is new again.

Is torrenting really free though? VPNs and seedboxes are not and torrenting without any of those is a bad idea in many countries. Usenet is quite cheap. I use both but I prefer the usenet tbh.

federated social media

Usenet was the original federated social media. Back when it was actually used for discussions, you'd post to your ISP's server, which would be federated with the other Usenet servers.

i2p seems very rudimentary for piracy imo even though it has been around a long time (I have only recently ventured into the realm of i2p, so forgive me, and let me know if I am wrong)

rubs hands together Oh yes, it's all coming together!

You put the tw2002 door on it and I’m so there!

OMG... we need a federated BBS.

In my opinion, the best provider is Eweka. You can still get the €3.99/mo offer at https://www.eweka.nl/en/landing/special-deal. They don't follow DMCA so uploads tend to last a lot longer. Ideally you'll have at least one block account from another provider on a different backbone. Check here for a map of providers and backbones https://usenetmap.b-cdn.net/latest.svg. The block account is for when your main provider is missing some parts. However, with Eweka this has been extremely rare for me so you can probably wait on getting a block account if you go with them.

Nowadays, you'll also need a good indexer (or two or three). Long gone are the days of searching for an nzb on a public site. Nzbgeek is probably a good one to start with since it has open registration. DrunkenSlug is another great one, but requires an invite. I don't think there is a lemmy alternative, so checkout r/usenetinvites if interested.

SABnzbd and NZBget are the two most used downloaders, but the latter is no longer being maintained.

Yeah I use SABnzbd, Sonarr and Radarr. You can basically add shows / movies through sonarr and Radarr, set the quality you want, and when they become available they'll automatically download for you. I've got mine setup on a raspberry pi which is also running a plex server. Would definitely recommend.