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Shame upon myself. 50tb this year DL, 0 UL. But hey, it's usenet, so that's perfectly fibe 😁
what about usenet makes that different? I've never used it
Besides it being around since forever and predecessing all forums and reddit etc.
It's main selling points for pir8s are:
- max speed (depending on your uplink and your provider ofc. E.g. I get a solid 120mb/s)
- up to maaany years retention (how old the stuff you want could be. Depends on provider ofc. Currently 11yrs from the top of my head)
- no need to upload or be member of trackers to get the GOOD stuff. It's all the same to everyone.
- it's still not really mainstream (luckily) and hence less dmcas
Downsides compared to torrents?
- in theory torrents can be as old as torrent itself. In reality torrents die quickly.
- no social component like if you're really engaged in some private tracker
- to have it efficiently you'd either one or more indexers (like search-engines). There are free ones but they suck. And/or forums. As much stuff is encrypted/obfuscated for obvious reasons.
Overall I'm a cheapskate and pay like 2€/month for unlimited usenet with maximum retention and 50 connection on the best backbone plus 2x 10-12€ a year for indexers. But one totally would be sufficient.
In the end, we enter a movie/series-name, pick the right one from the results, wait a bit for the download and sorting to happen, then watch it in emby comfortably. The comfortable kind of piracy i dreamt of for nearly 3 decades 😊
Which Usenet provider are you using, and which indexers?
Eweka. Not only the biggest backbone (afaik) but they also regularly have a supercheap offer like 2.50 with vpn and all. Speed is constant with only very rare occasions where it gets down to "just" 100mbit or so. 50 concurrent connections.
Indexers i tried many, but got stuck with geeknews. Would say i find 99% of what i search there. Price is 12 bucks per annum i think. With even a free tier. I don't even know the name of the other two as i never need to use them, they're just backups now and i will cancel them
Good stuff. So is Usenet like a message board? forum? Like technology wise it's obviously not as simple as a file host or it'd be down by now
Aye, it was originally (and still is) just a gargantuan forum which has no owner and is federated. It also has binary groups, which are "abused" by pir8s since forever. Dmcas happen sometimes, but not that often.
I somewhere commented a full how-to for a comfortable *arr-setup. But the most simple way is just using some newsreader.
Yes, here's my understanding:
it's essentially a massive collection of forum posts -- all text.
Files/binaries are encoded into text, and split into multiple posts if they exceed the max size for a single post. The names of posts and relationships between multiple posts can be obfuscated too.
Indexers provide .nzb files which are kinda like .torrent files, they indicate where in Usenet all the posts needed for a complete download are located.
You give an .nzb file to an nzb downloader, which finds the post(s), downloads, (merges,) decodes the final result into its original binary form, and does a hash check to make sure everything is correct.
There's some open source software like Radarr, for example, which can automate the entire process start to finish (in Radarr's case, for movies specifically)
With Radarr it goes like this: Add movie -> Radarr searches via indexer(s) for a .nzb matching the criteria -> .nzb gets sent to nzb downloader -> downloaded from usenet server(s) -> completed download is moved (and optionally renamed) by Radarr to desired location
That's fascinating. thanks!