Why would anyone decide to use USENET these days? (lemmy.darkc0de.one)

submitted 10 hours ago by resterWink@lemmy.darkc0de.one to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I'm not asking about how it is used for warez, since that is what it mostly hosting at this point... Nor am I asking why anyone should or should not start a community on USENET (many reasons why you wouldn't/couldn't).

Instead, I am asking why someone would only decide to engage with the textual, traditional, conversational aspects of USENET over modern tools like lemmy?

I could name a few I suppose:

Relative anonymity
Access to a large amount of history
Nostalgia
Communication with those who still frequent newsgroups

I don't know how many more there are but I would like to hear your guys' opinions in regards to those listed above and any others I may have missed.

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[-] NABDad@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago

I loved USENET back in the day, but it doesn't do what it used to.

Pure, or nearly pure text boards are still useful, but that's how I use Lemmy now. I just wish it had more general buy-in.

Honestly, you could look at USENET as federation before federation needed to be a thing. Way back when it was all hosted mostly on university servers. Lemmy seems to me to be very much the heir to USENET.

[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 points 50 minutes ago

i use a browser/mail client called seamonkey and their official community is on usenet. other than that pretty much every community seems dead sadly. honestly lemmy is much easier to use for me.

[-] tal@lemmy.today 7 points 2 hours ago

Well, I'm here rather than on Usenet. Overall, I think that the Threadiverse is preferable

Usenet had real spam problems for a long time.

But if you want some benefits:

Wide range of powerful, mature clients with extensive filtering functionality, offline reading support.
Better client-side accessibility. I mean, you can be blind and use a screenreader or something on Usenet. Going to be a lot less ideal on the Threadiverse.
Comment editors are probably better than the in-browser textarea editors or clients with limited text-editors that I've seen (though the Threadiverse has Markdown as a standard, which I think is generally preferable). Though I haven't been browsing Usenet in some time, and maybe they have MIME-encoded Markdown or HTML or something as a common thing now.
More-standardized support for posting embedded binaries.
Commercial service is available. It's great that people donate their time and funds to make Threadiverse servers run, but there's something to be said for the resources available from commercial service. There's nothing stopping someone from running a commercial Threadiverse instance, but AFAIK, nobody presently is doing so.
Newsgroups are more discoverable than are communities on the Threadiverse

you really need to use the https://lemmyverse.net/ index to find any communities out there, as otherwise you'll only see it once the exact name "!community@instancename" has been searched for on your local instance. Usenet (mostly) propagated newsgroups everywhere.

Probably a larger userbase, though I haven't dug up current numbers. Certainly a different group and set of interests.
Some PGP use and client support.
I would bet that Usenet servers can scale up to more load than can Threadiverse servers.

[-] kyonshi@dice.camp 1 points 2 hours ago

@tal usenet has gotten a bit better now that Google switched off the access from Groups. But it's kinda dead by now

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 4 points 3 hours ago

Usenet gave me my first girlfriend.

[-] daggermoon@piefed.world 4 points 4 hours ago

Is USENET used for piracy mostly?

[-] khannie@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Yep

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 3 hours ago

In line with nostalgia, some kind of tourism. People dress up as vikings and practice with axes, even though they don't remember the good ol' days of raiding monasteries.

[-] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 16 points 8 hours ago

Usenets great, pure text, tons of topics, its great. Same with Fidonet etc. Only downside is ISPs pushed it out to make access harder now.

[-] ramble81@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

I was so bummed when ISPs started ditching their own Usenet servers and a lot of the remaining ones were paid. Not to mention access to alt.bin.*

[-] orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 9 hours ago

Sailing the high seas.

[-] hazard_iguana@lemmy.world 6 points 7 hours ago

They already said not warez though

[-] notsosure@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 hours ago

How can one access Usenet on an iPhone ?

[-] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 9 points 10 hours ago

Relative anonymity

I don't know how Usenet works, but how is it anonymous? If it has central servers, police can just ask them for your IP address. If it's peer to peer, police or others can just participate and log your IP address.

I mean that is from the perspective of using it for piracy. Or what exactly do you mean by anonymity?

[-] Shadow@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 minutes ago

They rely on safe harbor provisions within the dmca. Its like how your isp can't be sued for you downloading warez, usenet providers just provide access to the network and look the other way at what goes over it.

[-] Overspark@piefed.social 5 points 7 hours ago

Usenet is a bit like the fediverse, it has tons of different servers that all talk to each other, and the admins of each server decide which groups it carries. So it you use a server outside the jurisdiction of the police you're afraid of you're somewhat anonymous.

[-] Pennywise@quokk.au 12 points 9 hours ago

It's kind of federated. You can purchase access through providers and use proxy/vpn.

Most ISPs no longer host or provide access.

[-] Shadow@lemmy.ca 6 points 7 hours ago

Purchasing and anonymous don't really go together.

[-] AverageEarthling@feddit.online 3 points 1 hour ago

In my experience, most servers encrypt the data transmitted. So, they can see you are connected, they can see how much data you are using, but they can't see what that data is. For all they know, you are downloading every Linux ISO in existence and nothing more. In the US at least, unless a service accepts cash or bitcoin (some do) it's not really anonymous but most are pretty secure. I've paid for usenet for probably 20 years now. No issues.

[-] Shadow@lemmy.ca 1 points 12 minutes ago* (last edited 6 minutes ago)

Usenet just encrypts the connection from you to their server, they can see perfectly well what the data you download is. They aren't prosecuted because they claim ignorance and that they're just providing you network access, which is why usenet providers that specifically advertise for piracy have been shut down. This is also aided by usenet not advertising what you're downloading (unlike torrents), so it's hard to send a dmca claim.

See https://www.vitallaw.com/news/copyright-c-d-cal-perfect-10-failed-to-establish-that-usenet-service-provider-did-not-qualify-for-dmca-safe-harbor/ipm013b319a047bc91000b319d8d385ad169401 for example, whereas old usenet.com actually provided indexing too and got shut down for it https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/07/judge-throws-book-at-usenetcom-in-riaa-lawsuit/

(I'm a happy long term usenet provider too)

[-] Pennywise@quokk.au 5 points 7 hours ago

Prepaid visa bought with cash. Next question?

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Although options there seem to be declining, as well, at least where I live.

[-] agentTeiko@piefed.social 3 points 9 hours ago

Same reason people use the tildeverse its good and pure.

this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026

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