Can someone explain the benefits of Usenet to a long-time torrent-er?

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/6240929

I’m a pretty heavy torrent user, running a media server complete with sonarr/radarr for automatic downloads. I download a lot, and have multiple TBs of upload on various private trackers. I’ve been torrenting forever, but I’ve always wondered about usenet. Over and over on this, and other, forums I see people saying that usenet is way better - but why?

I understand what it is overall, but what makes it better than traditional torrenting? In my mind, it’s always just seemed like a different means to the same end. I pay for a VPN and torrent for “free”, or I pay for usenet access and download directly from there. As someone who’s “snobby” around the quality of the stuff I torrent, does usenet provide an advantage there?

Usenet fans, I’d love to hear what makes you love it! I’m always open to trying new things, and if It really is better I’d love to know why! (Plus, maybe what providers/tools etc you recommend).

Petter1,

In my country, leeching is allowed, but not seeding. So I pay for leeching. Paying a usenet provider and a bunch of indexer (most lifetime) appeared more easy than leeching from torrents.

Treczoks,

Don’t know how you compare torrent to usenet. They were built for completely different purposes. If you abuse usenet for file sharing, don’t complain about any shortcomings, as you are trying to drive a screw into a wall with a hammer.

nonamefool,

I appreciate everyone’s love of torrents and also appreciate the technology. Whether or not we are driving a screw into the wall with a hammer, gosh darn it, it works. I don’t know or understand “what happens in the background” but I would challenge you to duel! Feel free to list a commonly available show/movie/book/pr0n/whatever and I will race you to find and download it! :)

woodgen,

Technology wise, Usenet abuses decade old Mailbox protocols and software for file downloads it was never designed for. Torrents are modern, decentralized and redundant. Usenet was always a huge PITA. Especially if some parts were missing.

butterypowered,

Yeah Usenet was crap for binary downloads long before the BitTorrent protocol was invented.

It’s just so under the radar that it continues to plod along.

nonamefool,

I remember when I was a teen, I used USENET to d/l pictures with a 26.4kbps modem - this was some time ago (let’s call it 20 years and not discuss it further)! I don’t think USENET is “plodding” at all. My setup is so automated that I spend less than 5 minutes a week verifying/whatever downloads and the like. No need to u/l anything. It. Just. Works. No risk of being hit by authorities for seeding a torrent (I have received a few ISP letters in the past that I was identified - granted I was not using a VPN or proxy at the time.)

pete_the_cat,

Torrents are modern, decentralized and redundant.

Unless the original seeder disconnects before someone else gets the full file. If they do then hopefully #3 gets it before #2 goes offline and so on. It takes a bit for the “web” to form. I’ve connected to tons of torrents over the years that were stuck at 99% or less, some as low as 1%. Torrents are only decentralized and fast if the content its sharing is popular.

Usenet, while ancient and centralized, is at least 10x faster in terms of downloads than any well seeded torrent could wish to be. Most Usenet servers have massive pipes and will easily max out your connection. I’ve had it max out a 10G pipe. Even highly seeded torrents like (actual) Linux ISOs only do a few megs a second, maybe 10 if you’re lucky.

I used torrents for years but after discovering (and understanding) the Usenet suite of apps (downloaders, indexers, index aggregators, specific content downloaders, etc…) it’s so much easier. I set it up and forget about it. Usenet access costs about $10/month and the indexers usually have a one time “donation”, but it’s way better for piracy.

pcjones,

For all German speakers I have a beginners guide: github.com/PCJones/usenet-guide

Chewy7324,

Thanks for the writeup! I’ll share it if someone needs a german guide. Your dual language guide helped me set up arr* for media since I want german audio for family, but also english for myself.

float,

German content is mostly on Sharehosters or One-Click-Hosters or whatever you call them. I really don’t know why because they are expensive and worse than the other options. I know BitTorrent is not popular in Germany because of the law but the Usenet could be the better option if it was more popular.

redprog,

Usenet is popular in Germany (among the fraction of the population that sails the high seas, that is). There are also German indexers with a shitton of German content

float,

Which indexer is that if I may ask (for a friend)? 😁

float,

Danke :-)

nonamefool, (edited )

New lemmy user. New to the forum. Please excuse any errors in posting.

I (may) have for quite a long time (10+ years) ran a NAS system that automatically downloads TV shows, Movies, Music, and the like.

Usenet is the way to go. Hands down. I (may) have also torrented a lot in the past…

As many others have mentioned retention times (the time each USENET server “keeps” the file available) is huge these days. Around 5+ years. Was the file uploaded 5 years ago? Chances are you still get it from your server with no problems. Lots of “old” stuff is frequently re-uploaded to servers. General availability of stuff that is “new” or “popular” is very high.

As some others have mentioned USENET is usually ONE server that you pay for. A file is uploaded to server X, and is mirrored by (your) server Y (and all/most other servers). You are not actually downloading (in most cases, as is mine) from multiple servers simultaneously. Many servers do allow multiple connections to download the entire files parts at the same time, however. Bonus: Most/all reputable USENET servers also have SSL as an option (even with custom ports). Your ISP has no clue what your traffic is since it is encrypted with SSL (and perhaps even on a custom [non-standard] port). My USENET server peaks out at the ISP provided bandwidth on all downloads.

Someone else also mentioned indexers and equated them to the “google of USENET.” I agree. Indexers are absolutely required for a full USENET ease-of-use experience (and for all automation apps). Automation apps use this indexer to search for the applicable files (.nzb: .nzbs are kind of like a .zip file full of the references of the files on USENET to download an entire (big) file.)

I have had the same USENET provider for over a decade. I think it costs me <$100/year (and comes with a VPN and proxy). I purchased a lifetime membership with an indexer that has never left me wanting for like $100 years ago. Still works like a charm.

I saw someone mention some automation apps such as: sabNZBd, sonarr, raddar, and lidarr. These apps will cover 90% of what you are looking for unless it is somewhat niche. There are also automation apps for books, comics, anime, manga, and other stuff out there. Pretty easy to find. My automation programs automatically look for new TV shows, movies, and etc. that aired/released, downloads them, categorize them, rename the files, transfer them to my storage, download subtitles, have criteria (as someone mentioned before) as to which file type/region/size/bitrate that I want. It just works, now that I have it all setup, in the background. I spend 5 minutes a week on ensuring things have been downloaded and are in there place.

Typically if a new show was released (aired) on Tuesday, my rig would have it downloaded by the next day (by automation apps) when I was ready to watch TV. I have had several folks ask for specific things, and was able to find them with my automation apps (more below) in very short course.

Regarding torrent automation: It seems a bit harder. Torrents are slower to download and a “bit” harder to process/automate. Some torrent downloaders don’t natively support VPN or a proxy (I am speaking from the “I do it on Truenas perspective” as opposed to “I do it on Windows.”) I assume that most, if not all, Window’s torrent programs support both aforementioned methods of IP obfuscation.

I am not posting links or naming either my USENET provider or my indexer due to the fact that I don’t understand the subs rules, nor do I want to look like an advertising shill.

Please message me if you want anymore information or if there is anything I can do to help out.

– Have a fun time sailing the seas.

Edit: Small edit. Some misspellings and reorganizing paragraphs to better flow. Added another paragraph about torrent automation.

Nyarlathotep,

Good summary, that will help a lot of people.

I think it is worth pointing out to those that don’t know that automation via the *arr apps is optional. Sure, it’s great, but it’s not like you need to learn that whole toolchain right away. With a good indexer, a good server, and a good download app you can get going really easily. You’re just doing manual searches and clicking to download nzb files.

I have also found that having more than one indexer helps. Part of the trick is finding a few that complement each other–and then getting an invitation to register. Everyone has their own opinion on what combos are good.

BrownianMotion, (edited )
@BrownianMotion@lemmy.world avatar

As I have said in the past, there are plenty of good free ones, and there are also spotweb (spotnab) sites that are great as long as your a fast (ie dcma).

Also the “arrrs” were designed with usenet first, its not an afterthought.

if you want to get access to good indexers, then yeah you may need to wait until you get am invite or an invite period opens, but you have to do this, its just how they operate.

you can do torrents and usenet in your arrr, at the same time. So nothing stops you from having both.

but the SPEED AND RELEASES youll see on usenet are unsurpassed and probably at least a week earlier than on your torrent sites.

Also you can run your own indexer for usenet (wont be as good as some because it wont deal with obfuscated posts, but as a backup it will be fine)

Id suggest you go down the rabbit hole and decide for yourself if you like it, you can always cancel.

oh and usenet is encrypted (if you enable it, ie port 563) so not much chance of knowing what your are doing. No more than a VPN company letting on to what a user was doing.

nonamefool,

Agreed. Automation is optional. You can easily get started with many popular Windows apps that are readily available (my advice is to always go open-source).

Setting up automation was a laborious task for me. I set it all up on TrueNAS - so it was a bit harder that just using Windows apps and file systems. But, well worth the time!

My indexer has been darn rock solid for all the things I have ever looked for. Do you have any insight as to any other indexer that might benefit me? Got an invite to give out?

Nyarlathotep,

I will give you a quick overview of what I have found. No invitations are needed for the indexers I use. AFAIK we can name names here, right?

NZBPlanet has been good for me, and I bought lifetime there years ago. However, as time went on I noticed some holes in their coverage–mainly for older stuff. I still use it as my primary, though. I am not sure if they still sell the lifetime tier, but registration is open so you can take a look. I am not sure what the free tier gets you though, it isn’t listed in their tiers page. If you are interested primarily in current stuff, I feel like the lifetime membership still ain’t bad. Registration appears to be open.

I found that DrunkenSlug filled in a lot of the gaps that I found on NZBPlanet. I liked it enough that I recently bought a year. The free tier at 5 downloads per day is not generous, but it can definitely help if you are in a jam. They also have open registration, at least right now.

ABNZB is also in my rotation, but only at the free tier, which is also 5 downloads. (I think I am a “legacy” free member with 25 downloads.) My impression is that its coverage is similar to NZBPlanet but once in a while it helps me find something that I don’t find at Planet or Slug.

Lastly, the totally free and primitive looking binsearch.info is worth a bookmark as a site of last resort. It’s bailed me out before.

If I was starting over from scratch I might do Slug instead of Planet.

We’re all looking for different stuff and it’s hard to be definitive about coverage, but these are my impressions.

For a server I have been very happy with Eweka. I don’t even have a block account elsewhere for fills. Once in a blue moon there is something I can’t get at all, I just roll with it. I already have more Linux ISOs than I can use. :)

state_electrician,

Is there any worry about your details leaking from the server you’re using? With Torrents I can use a VPN from a different country and I won’t worry. But for Usenet I have to pay and money always leaves a trail. I am probably worrying too much about that, but I just can’t shake it.

ramenbellic,

Most services allow you to pay with cash, crypto, or gift card.

LunchEnjoyer,
@LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world avatar

Revolute have digital disposable cards

stown,
@stown@lemmy.world avatar

Paying for a piracy service kind of defeats the purpose for me. At $100 per year I would rather rent the movies and rip them myself.

sherpajosh,
@sherpajosh@lemmy.ml avatar

I used to think paying for defeats the purpose too. But the super fast, easy access to everything and not having to worry about maintaining a ratio anywhere, I am now happy to pay a little something, it’s nowhere near $100 per year for me. From what I understand with private trackers now, you’re going to need pay for a seedbox to keep a decent ratio or seed forever with a home connection. I don’t have the disk space to seed forever, so I pay for usenet.

And I would much rather pay what I am paying every year rather than spending the time to rent and rip the hundreds of hours of movies and tv I download.

stown,
@stown@lemmy.world avatar

When you rip your own you get to control the quality, which I think is the best part, but I suppose if you needed to rip 100s of movies a year it would become a chore. The thing is that the majority of new movies and TV can easily be found on BitTorrent, so I would only need to rent and rip a few obscure or older films in a year, and those could probably be found at the library.

Zavasay,

$100/year is less than $9/month. You’re not going to get very many rentals with that. Whereas Usenet, you can get as much as you want. $9 a month is also less or the same as a single subscription to a streaming service. I’d gladly pay $9 for one place to have everything I want. I’ve never used usenet, just pointing out why it would be worth to some people to pay for it.

stown,
@stown@lemmy.world avatar

Do you know how much a library membership costs where you are? Are you unable to rent movies at your public library? BitTorrent covers the majority of my needs but when I can’t find that older movie online I can usually find it at my public library.

Zavasay,

Okay you got me. I definitely was not remembering you can rent for free from public libraries. That is highly under utilized feature in my life (and many people’s) but I have, in the last five years, been using it a lot more for audio books.

Inktvip,

You essentially pay for convenience. If there was a streaming service that had everything I would gladly pay good money for it, since there isn’t, I have to curate my own library instead.

Having good indexers/Usenet providers and automations takes away a lot, if not all the time needed to hunt down good releases. That saved time and hassle is what’s worth the ~100/year for me.

matey,

Where provides lifetime subscriptions?

nonamefool,

usenetreviewz.com/nzbgeek-review/

This is the indexer I use. I do not know if the information on the site linked is accurate or not, as I have paid for a lifetime subscription years ago.

I do not know of any USENET servers that offer lifetime subscriptions.

joeyb4589,

I’m interested. I haven’t torrented in years because of security issues. How would one go about utilizing this service. You pay for Usenet, but where? And how do you use it?

beetlebatter,

+1 for nzbgeek and may I suggest bundling it with nzb.su. If nzbgeek doesn’t have something you want, nzb.su probably will, and vice versa. I have not found another indexer to have something I could not get with those two. And I have not found a single indexer to have everything. So they compliment each other very well. Plus, they’re not too bad price wise compared to some other well known ones. And registration is public, so you don’t have to wait for an invite or for them to open registration.

You could use just one, and I’d suggest it be nzbgeek, but you will probably be missing some things that the other will have.

lud,

Torrents can also be automated, of course.

bastion,

Least-effort response

SmokeFree,

If you are on top tier trackers, there is no benefit to go usenet.

Internetexplorer,

What are top tier trackers, tpb?

citruslumps,

Yes.

Mudface,

With a Usenet account, I was able to make things relatively autonomous.

I told it what I wanted and it found it immediately, downloaded it, renamed it, even replaced it with higher quality whenever it became available.

It would find new episodes of shows I asked it to look for as they aired, new movies I was interested in as soon as they became available, Scott’s, genres, it was crazy.

If I was at work and someone recommended me a movie, I could add it to an IMDb watch list and my PC at home would have it downloaded automatically before I even got home.

It was way too efficient for me, I don’t watch much ‘content’ in real life, but it was so easy and efficient I ended up with dozens of TB’s of stuff that I never had the time to watch to begin with.

I was a collector of ‘content’ and not a consumer of it. So I stopped torrenting and using Usenet.

But Usenet is really pretty awesome with the right setup. I felt like I didn’t need to do shit once I set everything up.

Rambler,

and my PC at home would have it downloaded automatically before I even got home.

Hi, could you please explain how you got this to happen? Thanks.

Mudface,

forums.reeltalk.club/t/…/92

You need to put a little work in setting up a few different programs to all work together, the first time might take you awhile depending on how familiar you are with it (my first time it took me a few days to get everything set up how I like it).

But it’s worth it for the convenience you’ll enjoy

Rambler,

Thanks for the link - I’ll definitely look into it.

EyesEyesBaby,

I use both and let the “arr suite” decide which one to chose. I mainly use torrents for international stuff like movies, usenet for local (Dutch) stuff like TV series.

nopersonalspace,

Thanks! Using them alongside torrents seems to be a good idea. Maybe it would improve my ability to find more obscure stuff!

DomoPANTS,

It works a lot smoother for me, though I do see signs of things changing with torrent stuff.

Usenet is much more consistent and works better with automation software like radarr and sonarr. It’s all scene naming so you are less likely to pickup something joe blow made poorly. It is also much easier to find older things since you aren’t relying on active seeders.

It’s safer because it’s not illegal to download said files, just distribute them. Also no one cares about Usenet.

Never had a problem with quality, I have minimum and maximum quality settings configured for different profiles.

That said, it might be worth looking into Stremio and Debride. I’ve been seeing that pop up lately and it’s mostly torrent based.

One piece of advice if you go usenet, for good performance you want two accounts. Your main account and a secondary account on a different backbone provider. There are a lot of resellers, so make sure the parents are different. This is because they get a ton of takedown notices, so you might get holes here and there in the rars. But you can usually pick those up from your secondary. The software handles this automatically but you need the accounts.

Usually your main is some kind of unlimited subscription and the backup is a block account where you pay for a chunk of data at a time, but you do you.

nopersonalspace,

Thanks! Working better with the arrs is a sell for sure. I have my setup pretty well tuned for torrents, but still sometimes it can’t find something that meets my filters because it’s not named/categorized correctly.

janguv,

That said, it might be worth looking into Stremio and Debride. I’ve been seeing that pop up lately and it’s mostly torrent based.

Just a correction on this point. With a debrid service, it’s not actually torrent-based – not in the sense that at any point you’d be utilising any p2p traffic/mechanisms. It relies on torrenting activity in a different sense, in that what you download is encrypted DDL files from the debrid provider’s central cache, whose origin is in torrents. And if there’s no files meeting your search query stored already in the cache, but which are available through public trackers, then you’d request the service downloads the torrent to its cache. So at no point are you accessing peers. Worth noting that afaik, this is all for public trackers, not private.

fat_stig,

Are you using Prowlarr? It allows you to use both Usenet and Torrent sources transparently with the Arrs. Works really well for me and you get good performance stats of each source.

Chewy7324,

It’s simpler to get onto good indexers for german media on usenet than it is to find a private tracker and get into it.

Also, my upload is slow so I’d have to use a seedbox to torrent on private trackers instead of using my homeserver.

I like P2P filesharing more than usenet since it’s decentralized. Most usenet providers with long retention are owned by only a few parent companies which is never good in the long term. As long as private VPN’s are allowed torrenting can’t be stopped.

On usenet with my indexer I find dual language 1080p remuxes for most movies, so I’d say the quality is as good as it can be. But this is probably also the case with a good private tracker.

If your already on private trackers that have all the media you want I really don’t see any advantage to usenet.

As for tools, it’s mostly the same as with torrenting. The arr* stack supports usenet, it just downloads with sabnzbd instead of qbittorrent (or your preferred client).

nopersonalspace,

Thanks, yeah the impression I’ve gotten before is that it’s mostly the same. But maybe using it as a backup for my normal torrents could be useful for more niche stuff that I can’t find in private trackers…

sp451,

Any tips for indexers that have German media that you are willing/able to share?

Chewy7324,

SceneNZBs is all I need for movies/shows in german. They have a partnership with the german nzb forum House of Usenet, so their index is awesome.

German article: https://tarnkappe.info/artikel/szene/usenet/scenenzbs-com-neuer-usenet-indexer-in-kooperation-mit-hou-geoeffnet-244147.html

Guide for preferring dual language media: https://github.com/PCJones/radarr-sonarr-german-dual-language

pcjones, (edited )

Have a look at my German Usenet beginners guide: github.com/PCJones/usenet-guide

Let me know if you need any further help

RalphFurley,

In the 1990s it was the go to place to download pr0n and gore photos.

finestnothing,

That’s the fun part, it still is!

cheet,

I’m a torrenter with the sonarr radar lidarr prowlarr *arr setups.

I’ve dabbled with Usenet and here’s my understanding.

With torrents you’re all sharing something live, if you want ubuntu.iso and I have ubuntu.iso you can get it from me and many others who seed this file. A torrent tracker (or the dht) helps put us in touch so you know where the file is.

With Usenet it’s more like I dead drop this file, zipped and encrypted(?) onto a Usenet news server. All the Usenet providers mirror each other or something like that, so if you’re on a diff provider than me that same file should still be available. Then I tell an indexer, like dognzb or nzbgeek that this file is in fact ubuntu.iso and not garbage data. When you want ubuntu.iso you ask the indexer, indexer gives you a link and you get the file.

Beyond this, I don’t know about how much safer it is, but my immediate guess is that since you’re not seeding there’s less risk.

Now if you’re really snobby like me, you’ll quickly realize that the release groups you’re used to aren’t as well represented. I’ve often landed in situations where episode 7 of 20 is missing on Usenet…

As a snob, I’ve decided private trackers are probably the best place to be to keep my quality expectations satisfied.

Hope this helps.

nopersonalspace,

Awesome, yeah that makes sense. My biggest worry/confusion was about how more niche releases end up on there and so that clears things up. I’ve mostly been happy with what I can find via private trackers, so maybe it makes sense to stick with that.

NightAuthor,

I was under the impression that “the scene” mostly released to Usenet and torrents were reuploads. But also that you needed to be on some private indexers or something to find the original uploads bc they’re not uploaded with obvious titles bc of the issue of DMCA takedowns (that are honored by Usenet hosts)

Never liked paying for Usenet, so I didn’t use it very long.

eatfudd,

The scene uploads to their own ftp servers. Someone who has access to those servers then uploads to usenet or torrent sites.

pmyourtwat,

Surely you mean 7 out of 20 parts of ubuntu.rar

pcjones,

This is a really great ELI5 explanation of how Usenet filesharing works technically, nice!

pete_the_cat,

Both torrents and usenet have their pros and cons. The major difference being that usenet is centralized but torrents are decentralized. Usenet is faster in general than even well seeded torrents, usually by many magnitudes, but it costs about $8-12 USD/month if you get it directly from the provider, and not a reseller. Well seeded torrents can’t (easily) be taken down and they’re free to access, but if the content their seeding isn’t popular it’s usually very slow to download and the availability of the file is up to those seeding it.

commie,

you pay for an account on some server. that helps the server with bandwidth and storage costs. the server you use knows where some popular forums are (sort of like fediverse) and will cache certain boards.

when you want one of the items, you ask your server for it and they shove it down the pipe.

don’t forget to pay your bill.

edit: i only read the title. it seems like i literally taught you nothing. sorry to waste ur time.

nopersonalspace,

Haha no worries, still helpful. I edited the title to be a bit more clear about what I’m asking for :)

Xirup,
@Xirup@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I am interested in this topic but I unlike the OP do not know anything about the theme, what difference does Usenet have from a debrid service like AllDebrid? if I’m not wrong, Alldebrid download on their servers by torrent the magnet you give it and you just download it as a direct download, what difference does this have with Usenet?

Nyarlathotep,

The two things are similar in the big picture view. You do a direct download from Usenet as well. The difference is in where the data comes from (people choosing to upload files, like they choose to seed) and how exactly you download it (you need one or more usenet indexer accounts plus download tools).

Usenet is basically an old school message board that has adapted to host binary files instead of shitposts. :)

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