Discovering Usenet

When it comes to the concept of communicating with multiple people, sharing information, and exchanging data and files through connected computers, think of Usenet as “the Grandaddy of them all.” Long before internet forums, message boards, or social media, people visited Usenet to communicate with different people in the same manner that those other mediums provide for today.

Originally started in 1979, Usenet actually pre-dates the internet by a decade. At first, it was simply used in the same manner as the internet, albeit on a much smaller scale: it was a way to communicate news and announcements between the University of North Carolina and Duke University, whose campuses are separated by only eight miles.

Usenet was named after the Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) protocol suite for exchanging data, which was originally performed over a dial-up data. In the early days, that was the most common way that the system disseminated information over the internet, or even in the days before the internet.

Newsgroups, And More

All of that being said, Usenet still an excellent medium and resource for gathering, reading, and discussing information from all over the world. Even today, millions of people use Usenet to post articles and messages to newsgroups, which are then transmitted to a whole host of other systems, allowing it to be consumed in different ways by different people.

Similar to how you access the internet through the use of a web browser, Usenet uses a client-server system, meaning you use some type of client running on your computer to request services from a server that’s running elsewhere (as part of Usenet).

Your client program is most often referred to as a newsreader, and it connects to a remote news server which contains the information, postings, or data that other users have shared within various newsgroups. The servers on Usenet essentially “ping” each other on regular intervals to make the information stored available to people logged in to one of the servers.

This differs from a bulletin board service (BBS) or web forum because you’re not actually logging in to one central location. Rather, you’re logging in to a collection of servers that aggregate, communicate, and store information through these news feeds. Simply put: there’s no centralization with Usenet.

Like with any other communications medium, you can consume information from a variety of newsgroups on Usenet, based on your interest or a particular topic of discussion. These newsgroups are referred to as alt binaries, because of their “alt.(topicname)” format.

When individuals submit and exchange articles or thought pieces on Usenet, they tag them using universally recognized labels, to categorize that information for people interested in that. For instance, there are newsgroups for anything ranging from news, current events, technology, travel and food, media, relationships, science fiction, the environment, and so many more things in between.

Few people realize that, through this early form of discourse, Usenet is the place where common internet terms like “spam” and “flame” originated.

Usenet For File Sharing

While the original intent of Usenet was to exchange text-based information, it eventually evolved to where users could distribute binary files amongst each other. As the popularity of Usenet rose, users eventually figured out that they could distill files into binary data, turn it into text, and then post it to Usenet.

That would allow other people to access that information, decode the file, and then download whatever that content happened to be. Depending on the size and the nature of the file, they were split up into multiple parts. As one might imagine, things eventually got to the point where Usenet became more about filesharing than it did about the original concept of information sharing and discourse.

Even with all the other ways people all over the world can communicate with each other, Usenet’s basic ability to allow users to share files has allowed it to survive for this long.

Of course, in recent times, internet users have made torrents the preferred way to distribute files amongst each other. But because of the crackdown on torrent indexes and BitTorrent websites, these users have been exploring different ways to exchange data legally, without getting lumped in with all the bad apples trying to exchange information legally.

That’s led to things coming full circle, with people migrating back towards Usenet, which never went anywhere even though everyone else appeared to have moved on.

How popular is Usenet becoming? Take a look at the numbers. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of uploads to Usenet servers went up from just under one million per day to just under 15 million per day. And then, between 2010 and 2017, that number went from just under 15 million uploads per day to over 64 million uploads per day.

But here’s the key distinction: Usenet is not peer-to-peer, as was the case with popular software programs, like Napster and Limewire, that were eventually shut down. And with torrents, you’re essentially accessing portions of a file (torrents) from a variety of sources (users), that come together to form the file you’re interested in.

With Usenet, you’re still downloading multiple pieces of one file, but they’re all coming from Usenet server(s). The information you’re sharing is not a direct swap with another person on the internet. So, Usenet is only as good as the data that’s being provided to it by users.

If you upload a file, it’s automatically shared among hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, and can be downloaded an unlimited amount of times. The only restriction for a person to access it is based on their connection to Usenet and the bandwidth of their internet service provider.

Now, some people might complain that Usenet’s most desirable services — like file exchanges — are not free, as opposed to torrents. The prices for the various applications that allow you to access Usenet vary based on how long you want servers to keep files, how fast you can download, how secure the download is, and how much you can download each month.

However, the small amount of money you might have to pay for Usenet will provide you a strong return on investment, when you consider the upside of using the service for downloads:

Privacy

If you have a secure connection, not only will the content you access and download be untraceable, but the data you consume with your internet connection cannot or will not be attributed to Usenet downloads. While internet service providers (ISP’s) can detect downloads via torrents, and bottleneck your data rates as a result, that’s not the case with Usenet.

Easier Access To Content

To start off, unlike with torrents, you’re not required to share the files you download to Usenet. So, you’re free to share what you like, and consume what you like. And when you decide to download something that strikes your interest, you’re not dependent on how many seeds or peers you’re accessing said content from.

Volume Of Content

Because Usenet is essentially a large repository of information, it can be looked at the same way in terms of files and content. As the popularity of Usenet has grown, servers have been able to keep more and more content online for a longer period of time. Some files can remain stored for years.

This compares very favorably to torrents because with the latter, older content quickly gets cycled out and unsupported by the people sharing these files.

Anonymous Downloads

Assuming you have a secure connection, then everything you download from Usenet is completely private. Most Usenet providers do not log what content you are accessing or downloading.

As is the case with any type of technology, there are always a few “cons” to consider.

For one, like with most types of software, there’s also a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using the software applications that allow you to access Usenet. Some of the news reader applications that you’ll need are not quite as user-friendly as, say, your basic web browser.

You’ll need to poke around and/or do some internet research on how to do things like finding and downloading any files you might be looking for.

One of the main downsides to Usenet — which someone is sure to come up with a solution with, at some point — is that it’s not accessible via mobile devices. It’s estimated that nearly half of all internet traffic comes from some mobile device, meaning that the full extent of information and content that could be available through the medium is curtailed.

There are currently web-based interfaces that do allow users to browse files in news groups and see what’s available for them to access, and even bookmark that information for when they’re back on their main computer.

It is fair to say that Usenet users do try to ensure the software keeps a low profile because they don’t want to expose how much content is available on the service — especially content that’s copyrighted, and thus illegal to share. For those people with those motivations, the last thing they want is this resource to come under any additional scrutiny.

But assuming you’re interested in using Usenet for less nefarious purposes, it’s an excellent way to access a wide swath of information and content at higher speeds, and with more security.