Title says it. Is anyone still on the newsgroups? For reasons I need to amass a large collection of music in MP3 format, preferably full albums, and I’d like to do it somewhat quickly. Is there a better place to hunt before I buy news server access? I been on land for too many years.
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Usenet is still very much a thing.
I use Eweka.nl (Usenet access) and NZBGeek (indexer). Works well.
Usenet is all I use… highly recommend it.
Nah, my provider killed them about a decade ago.
I use it exclusively. I think it’s better than worrying about torrents. It almost feels obfuscated with the indexer.
i miss rec.sport.pro-wrestling.fantasy T_T
After struggling previously to get it set up, I have everything set up with Radarr, Sonarr, and SAB and I have yet to not find something. It’s sooooo good. BUT, you need to set it up specifically.
I use soulseek for music full albums.
for music theres also soulseek, or ripping from streaming platforms (deezer/tidal/qobuz)
Local public libraries may have CDs you can borrow and rip. If you have a CD drive.
I was under the impression Usenet was a BBS from the past, with designated port and server software, but people in the comments pay to use it as a P2P network?
How does it compare to soulseek?
Usenet actually has a very similar design to Lemmy. In fact I sometimes wonder why Lemmy didn’t evolve the Usenet protocol rather than invent one from scratch.
It’s a big discussion forum organized into a tree-like topic structure, replicated across multiple servers, and any participant can contribute via any of the servers.
Usenet was much more than a BBS from the past, in the sense that nearly everyone subscribed/participated in it. It was NNTP way back when, but tens of thousands of computers would sync all those messages at every node. By the late 80’s you even had binaries.
But then it all changed, and those nodes today are just corporate server farms and have really nothing to do with what Usenet was except name only. So yes, people pay to use a corporate node.
I haven’t tried soulseek, just learned about it from the replies to this thread. Last time I saw the newsgroups was almost 29 years ago. I’m definitely going to give soulseek a shot.
I’m a huge Soulseek user/advocate and if you’d like some tips, DM me and I’ll give you my username to chat.
Excellent! Thank you
I predominantly use Usenet for procuring all my media, except for
- Switch ROMs, which I rely on torrents via NSWTL. I have 4 indexers and all of them give me “missing parts” error when I try to download Switch ROMs.
- Music, which I rely on Telegram bots. I am in the process of migrating my streaming library to Navidrome and I haven’t found a better workflow than to send a playlist link to the bot, and downloading the music and then tagging it using Picard.
What’s the benefit of usenet over torrents?
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Generally don’t need a VPN with usenet because according to isp providers it’s general downloaded content with encryption so they don’t see what you’re downloading
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speed depends on your provider, not seeder counts, meaning that it’s generally much more consistant speeds and can easily reach multi gigabit
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don’t need to worry about seeding at all, instead you have two caps to worry about that reset daily for indexes, api hits and download counts. Generally you get a couple thousand api hits for third party apps or your Starr apps and a few hundred downloads per day.
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older content is generally easier to find on usenet because there is no inactivity deletion due to lack of seeders like on private torrent trackers. The only limitation is your providers retention time generally in the thousands of days range
The one major downside of usenet over torrents is that you pay for access either monthly, yearly, or lifetime for both the provider and the indexer.
And you do need both because the providers give you the ability to download the files and the indexers host the files. So if you have just an indexer you can see the files but not download them or if you have just a provider you have the ability to download the files but can’t find any files to download.
Hope this helps!
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lots of people using Usenet.
I have 2 main servers on 2 different networks, plus some block accounts as backup and a couple of indexers.
But for music, especially if its anything unusual, rare, or otherwise difficult to locate elsewhere, get onto soulseek. I use N+ personally and have uploaded ~80TB this year so far and downloaded about 600Gb. I dont do torrents very often so SLSK is how I give back to the community.
Soulseek is an old school free file sharing P2P platform, like limewire, kazaa, winmx, ed2k etc. just like the good old days.
So I’ve wanted to try out soulseek as it seems awesome, but do you know if it’s useable using a VPN? IceVPN, to be specific. i Have it running an openvpn config since theres no native linux client.