Just wondering what a rough split is of people using either Usenet, torrents, or both?

I’ve only just discovered Usenet and while it is paid, it is very cheap and much more convenient than torrents.

Using torrents as well with the *arr suite set up for my various Linux ISOs.

    •  bzxt   ( @bzxt@lemmy.ml ) 
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      36 months ago

      I am also in that basket. To me Usenet seems like another, older protocol that achieves practically the same thing. If someone is more knowledgeble, feel free to correct me or explain further.

    •  overload   ( @overload@sopuli.xyz ) OP
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      66 months ago

      I used the wiki on r/usenet, which was pretty helpful.

      From my understanding, you need 3 things:

      1. Usenet Provider (these are servers that host all of the content - you pay them to have access to download the content)
      2. Indexer (this is kind of like Google but for the usenet providers - they will find and give you the .nzb file which will be used to access the content from the usenet provider above - you pay the indexer for their service)
      3. Usenet client (This would be akin to a torrent client like Qbittorrent - it is the program which you use to download the content from the provider, using the .nzb file provided by the indexer)

      Benefits of Usenet I believe are the high speed of downloads, generally accessibility to older and more niche content, and ease of use. You don’t need to fish through torrents hoping that the seed/peer numbers are enough to actually get all of the content in good time. I’ve found a lot of stuff there lately that I have not been able to find via torrenting sites, but are important childhood media to me/my wife.

  • Torrents only here… I have 8gbps internet. I’m privileged, so I seed (10x or one year). I don’t see a point to paying to be part of a usenet in my situation. I have a few private trackers I’m on. I should see about getting into a few more though to spread the bandwidth wealth. 4 seedbox vms to roundrobin the new torrents that get added.

  •  viking   ( @viking@infosec.pub ) 
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    76 months ago

    I’m mostly downloading fairly recently released stuff, so there’s no shortage of torrents on public trackers.

    I also don’t want any payment details associated with anything not explicitly legal, so that’d be a further deterrent from Usenet. Sure, I could use crypto, but even that links me to a wallet that might someday be traced back to me, so I’ll pass.

      •  viking   ( @viking@infosec.pub ) 
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        66 months ago

        Right, but whatever I’m doing on there really isn’t.

        As a matter of fact my current jurisdiction doesn’t even pursue copyright infringements, but I still don’t want to be linked to anything commonly seen as shady.

        •  overload   ( @overload@sopuli.xyz ) OP
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          36 months ago

          Fair enough, I was under the impression that if you are using SSL, all an ISP or VPN provider could see is that you are connected to whichever backbone provider you were connected to. I.e. The content of what you are downloading is encrypted.

          You could be downloading stuff that is not illegal, and I don’t think that is necessarily knowable by anyone except yourself.

          I may be way off here, I’m not an IT person, but that was my understanding of SSL.

        •  Count042   ( @Count042@lemmy.ml ) 
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          26 months ago

          This is incorrect. What you’d are doing while purely downloading is legal.

          Bit torrent exposes you to liability not because you are downloading but because you’re sharing which courts have decided is distributing/performing, no matter how small the block you upload.

          This is not an issue with Usenet.

          •  Chewy   ( @Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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            6 months ago

            Torrents are based on the idea that everyone using them pays for it with their bandwidth and hardware cost. Except for those leechers who don’t share.

            I’m paying more for my seedbox than for my usenet subscription. If I used my own hardware I’d pay with stress on my hardware, e.g. the disks aging and failing earlier because of seeding. The power consumption is also not negligeble, altough the server is also used for other purposes.

            With private trackers this idea of an equal exchange is more obvious because of ratio requirements.

            Edit: I’d say it’s similar to open source in that no single individual has to pay for it, but someone does have to, for it to exist. Most often with their (valuable) time and knowledge. If no one helps out and does their part (through money or time+knowledge), a project won’t survive for long. Same is true for torrents.

      •  viking   ( @viking@infosec.pub ) 
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        26 months ago

        You pay for traffic. There are some free versions out there, but they limit you to 10-25 GB or something. Might be an option for the 1% you can’t find on public trackers.

  • I used to when usenet was free from every single ISP, there was an active community behind every single alt.binaries.* group, and it wasn’t “subscribe to this usenet provider that gives you 5 years of posts from every group and you download things by this oversimplified NZB crap” instead of relying on and engaging with the community to post new and interesting things all the time.

  • I tried it but TBH went back to torrents. I found it to be very fiddly to get working, every single component seems to want you to pay for it (and not wanting to pay for and keep track of half a dozen streaming things is one of the main draws for piracy for me anyway) and overall it just didn’t seem worth it to find the ~1% of things I can’t find on torrents (and I didn’t even find all of them on Usenet either.)

    Other people’s mileage may vary of course, but I didn’t really think it was worth it.