Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

DrunkenSlug is another great indexer, invite only and about $30 USD per year for their top offering.

I haven't used usenet for 15 years or so. After nzbindex chucked it in.

What's the situation with incompletes / DMCA'd releases?

Is one usenet subscription enough or do you have 2 monthly subscriptions? do you need a block account ?

I've actually never used torrents. Had newsgroups access years ago, but I think I am going to try soulseek for now.

slsk would also be my recommendation for music, though I'm not sure I can recommend in good faith leeching a bunch of music all at once. Unless it's a pretty even split amongst source users, and OP intends to share afterwards.

That sounds like a great place to start! Many thanks, matey!

1. 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

2. speed depends on your provider, not seeder counts, meaning that it's generally much more consistant speeds and can easily reach multi gigabit

3. 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.

4. 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!

Uses encryption so you can't be dinged by copyright trolls, high speed downloads (usually), easier automation and higher quality control.

Only note is that it isn't free.

You get to sit through interviews, possibly get to pay for access and have to deal with gatekeepers.

Joking aside, theres some variety in the selection. In my experience, torrents have excellent selection of mainstream and well known artist, not so much with smaller, niche and local artists. Soulseeks fills that hole nicely. Some friends of mine who use usenet have reported that when you need to find that one EP from that one band that existed for 4 months in 1978, you have good chances of doing that there.

For me, its not worth the effort and trouble getting things set up and getting in to a server. Others will disagree and tell you its the best thing since recording C-cassette tapes for your friends.

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.

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.

ever since i discovered soulseek has so many live radio recordings from the 70s and 80s i've been obsessed.

could you share the telegram bot you use? used to use some but they got banned some time ago

The missing parts sounds like a provider issue, not an indexer one. Do you have a backup block on a different backbone?