I’ve been using Usenet for about 20 years. So many upsides.

Usenet traffic is essentially indistinguishable from normal internet traffic, so you don’t have to worry about hiding your activity with a VPN (though you still can of course). And since you don’t need to upload/seed anything, you’re safe in that regard.

Downloads are pretty much always available, no seeds. Once a file is uploaded and propagated across all the servers, everyone can just download it at whatever full speed their connection allows. I saturate my connection at around 110 Megabytes per second. There are retention times based on your Usenet provider, but they’re incredibly high these days so I doubt you’d come across many incomplete downloads, if any.

Quality is consistent. This is the biggest deal for me, as I’m incredibly snobby about quality. Want 4K SDR because the HDR on your TV sucks? You can find it for most new shows. Want a version with a super-high bitrate? It’s usually out there. Full untouched BluRay rips? Definitely. Nearly all media is available from SD up through 4K, from consistent uploaders/groups so you can rely on the overall quality. And since you don’t have to worry about seeding or download speeds, you can grab the highest quality you want as long as you have enough disk space.

Automation is a cinch with native arr integrations, and new shows and movies are usually available right after they air, often before it’s finished airing. If a show airs at 8pm you can usually grab it by 8:15, 9:15 at the latest.

Keep an eye out on Black Friday, providers usually have awesome deals.

OK, let me mention some important caveats, just so you can keep them in mind:

You can think of usenet like the internet. You have data on servers all around the world, you have sites such as Google which index these sites and content, and you have your ISP which gives you access to the internet.

Likewise, on usenet you have the data scrambled on servers all around the world, on different backbones of the usenet. These backbones are accessed through service providers for the backbones (sometimes they’re resellers, sometimes it’s the backbone selling access). These service providers operate just like an ISP, selling you monthly or yearly access to the usenet backbone of your choosing.

Then there’s the Googles of usenet, Indexers. There’s a ton, they vary a bit from one another, but essentially they find all there is to find on usenet, presenting the files to you as a whole. You want a specific… Ahem… Linux iso? An indexer will know where all the pieces are and it will tell you with an NZB file, kind of like how torrent files tell you where to look. Indexers can be a monthly subscription, but some of them offer lifetime subscriptions as well, and they don’t break the bank.

The last bit you’ll need is your download client, to do what you do for torrents. These are free tools, sabnzbd and nzbget. Either one works.

So, I did mention there’s multiple backbones of usenet. Indexers don’t lock themselves to specific backbones, and no indexer covers everything there is on usenet, which means that to get the most out of usenet, you’d ideally have multiple indexers and multiple providers (making sure you don’t get providers from the same backbone as they’d essentially have the same data). Multiple indexers give higher chances of finding something on a search, while multiple backbones increase your chances of finding all the pieces needed to complete a file. This is not absolutely necessary, but dare I say you’ll notice the difference as soon as you bump things up to 2 of each.

So, essentially, usenet is by far the best method for completing your media library (leaving torrents as a desperate backup route), but it can become expensive.

As a disclaimer, I’m someone relatively new to usenet

Usenet has provided a much more consistent option for media quality for my server. Most titles in the last 20-25 years have around ten distributions ranging from 720p to 4k. The biggest difference are downloads. It’s no contest: better bandwidth with much much more consistent speeds. You won’t stumble on something with one seeder on a 300kbps connection. There’s no requirement to seed content back, although I recognize that if you’re using private torrent trackers this is likely the case for you already

Overall I enjoy how much better usenet is to gather media from when it comes to the amount of time from request -> server availability

They’re essentially direct downloads and some services have retention that’s goes back quite a while so you don’t have to worry as much about a lack of seeders. Since it’s not peer to peer the downloads are more consistent and consistently fast. ISPs don’t (yet) police Usenet traffic the same way they do torrenting. Since you’re not seeding anything back you aren’t technically breaking any (US) laws.

I don’t generally use either torrenting or usenet lately, though, so someone else could probably do a better job of this. The last time I used usenet was around 10 years ago and torrenting around 3. And I only used torrenting because it was easy to set up on Kodi with Seren.

Usenet is basically a forum so that’s where all the benefits lie. Files are split up into multiple parts and then propagated to various servers. So, just like BitTorrent, you’re downloading a file from multiple places at the same time and also are downloading multiple parts of the file at the same time.

The difference, though, is that, whereas with BitTorrent you’re reliant on the speed of someone else’s internet connection and the hope that enough people have enough parts of the file, Usenet files are hosted on dedicated servers and every file is mirrored to every Usenet mirror. These are typically dedicated connections too so the speeds are nice and fast.

The other less-used benefit is that BitTorrent files don’t really have a way to recover a download if the source file is corrupted or incomplete. If you download a file from a torrent and one of the users seeding has a corrupted part, you have to verify the contents of the file and then your client has to find a valid part to download from. This isn’t a big deal but can be a problem when a file or torrent has few seeds. With Usenet, your download comes with Parity (.par) files. These files are checksums that allow you to recover any number of parts or files so long as you have enough .par files downloaded to cover the number of pieces missing. This means that you can download incomplete archives at any point and you’re never reliant on other users since the .par files are also uploaded by the initial poster.

Both have their benefits and drawbacks but Usenet mostly wins on the first-past-the-post timeframe. BitTorrent probably wins as time goes on because it’s very rare for a torrent to have bad pieces or anything after the first day or 2 of the initial upload. Also, most scene releases are posted to Usenet first. So, if your concern is getting released as soon as possible, Usenet wins. If you want ease and not a lot of fucking around, BT wins.

Can anyone tell me if Usenet is any good for more obscure stuff? I mean if I want to find, say, that episode where Hyacinth says “Mind the cyclist Richard!”, would I be able to find it?

Direct download from high speed servers

It’s better because you don’t have to worry about ratios or finding torrents with seeders. You just download the media at whatever the maximum speed your connection can handle is. So you could, for example, download a 4gb episode for something 30 seconds after Sonarr checks for it.

As for the technical aspects, you don’t have to worry too about it, because since you use Sonarr it will handle most of the work, just like it does with torrents. The only problem I’ve found is there’s often not a lot of lower quality stuff on Usenet, so unless you tweak your Sonarr settings you’re gonna end up downloading 40gb anime episodes, because that’s the first thing Sonarr finds.