I found about Usenet and the sort of “hype” relative to it and I wonder some stuff.
Maybe I’m a bit old school but is this process not against the spirit of piracy,
- be generous to share
- fight against censorship and DCMA takedown
- work in a decentralized way
Just wondered it, if someone wants to give his opinion
Yeah, you missed it. It isn’t new at all. Piracy on Usenet predates Napster, and as pointed out probably predates the Web.
I am wrong but you need to use usenet providers to download stuff right? So it’s centralized and company based?
Yes, that’s how Usenet works. Although it is federated.
Replying to this before OP asks.
Usenet is distributed across hundreds (thousands maybe?) of servers. It’s centralized in that setting up your own server and getting the same access as joining an existing Usenet server is going to be very difficult (and with Usenet being used for privacy more and more, could be impossible due to admins not trusting a random new person), but in theory one could.
With modern Usenet there are about 8 or so backbones used for file sharing. Your Usenet provider/server would connect to one or more of these backbones.
Its true Usenet is designed for federation, and in the 80s and 90s it was thousands of servers but today commercial Usenet providers just resell these 8 backbones.
There are more than just 8 separate usenet servers that are out there. Many might not carry binaries but that does not define a usenet server. https://top1000.anthologeek.net/top1000.current.txt
I’m aware. You may have missed that I made that distinction in my first sentence.
Usenet has splintered into text and piracy. Text is low volume and many servers can peer with yours for free. Piracy is more centralized, gets spammed like half a petabyte every day, we know that because 99% of “the posts” never get downloaded even once, it’s commercial because of the huge storage requirements.