I don’t understand why usenet is a thing. It really liked it in the early days and it was basically like lemmy. Groups for different topics and also federated. Now it’s used to distribute warez but since it wasn’t made for it so stuff has to be base64 encoded and split into pieces…
I think most people don’t realize that Usenet is older than the World Wide Web. It’s still a thing because it wasn’t corporatized like the Web was.
AT&T used to include Usenet access as part of your Internet connection since both Usenet and the Web are on the Internet but they quit doing that some years ago (back in the halcyon days of DSL).
AT&T used to include Usenet access as part of your Internet connection
And this was commonly seen as a Bad Thing (see the Eternal September) because normies change the culture of specialist spaces when they show up in large numbers.
so stuff has to be base64 encoded and split into pieces…
You say that like it’s an issue. With modern Usenet binary downloaders (SABnzbd) and indexers, you don’t have to browse groups. In fact you most likely can’t. The indexer provides you with the map where the files are located (the nzb files) and SABnzbd finds them, starts downloading them, checks if all files are downloadable and keeps going or stops if there aren’t even enough files available to attempt a repair.
All of that is abstracted from the user. You tell Radarr/Sonarr what movie/series you want and it will handle everything, from querying the indexers to passing the nzb along to SABnzbd and to automatically restart the process if somehow the download fails.
It’s a shame no one uses Usenet for its original purpose though. It was reddit before the internet itself.
From a user perspective it’s not a problem. I’m just sad what an abomination my beloved pre-reddit has become. Also it’s super weird like using bicycles for international shipping instead of container ships without telling the user and hiding the whole process in the background.
I don’t understand why usenet is a thing. It really liked it in the early days and it was basically like lemmy. Groups for different topics and also federated. Now it’s used to distribute warez but since it wasn’t made for it so stuff has to be base64 encoded and split into pieces…
I think most people don’t realize that Usenet is older than the World Wide Web. It’s still a thing because it wasn’t corporatized like the Web was.
AT&T used to include Usenet access as part of your Internet connection since both Usenet and the Web are on the Internet but they quit doing that some years ago (back in the halcyon days of DSL).
And this was commonly seen as a Bad Thing (see the Eternal September) because normies change the culture of specialist spaces when they show up in large numbers.
You say that like it’s an issue. With modern Usenet binary downloaders (SABnzbd) and indexers, you don’t have to browse groups. In fact you most likely can’t. The indexer provides you with the map where the files are located (the nzb files) and SABnzbd finds them, starts downloading them, checks if all files are downloadable and keeps going or stops if there aren’t even enough files available to attempt a repair.
All of that is abstracted from the user. You tell Radarr/Sonarr what movie/series you want and it will handle everything, from querying the indexers to passing the nzb along to SABnzbd and to automatically restart the process if somehow the download fails.
It’s a shame no one uses Usenet for its original purpose though. It was reddit before the internet itself.
From a user perspective it’s not a problem. I’m just sad what an abomination my beloved pre-reddit has become. Also it’s super weird like using bicycles for international shipping instead of container ships without telling the user and hiding the whole process in the background.
It’s more under the radar since it’s harder to do