cross-posted from: https://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).
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.
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.
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.
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.