I wish Usenet wasn‘t misunderstood as a file sharing network anymore.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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And we went back to it being used as forums?
I still use it as forums. That's what it can do best.
I was just confirming. It seemed to me that use had tapered off completely. Glad to know that's not the case. In a way, Lemmy is essentially a reimplementation of Usenet. Decentralized, federated forums.
What server do you use?
In a way, Lemmy is essentially a reimplementation of Usenet. Decentralized, federated forums.
Usenet was never really "federated". All servers mirror slightly different hierarchies (with the free ones usually focusing on text and the commercial ones focusing on binary files).
What server do you use?
I've been a happy user of Eternal September (the name alone was awesome enough!) for quite some time now.
Thanks! Was it always not federated? I thought it was, in is halcyon days. Might be just my faulty memory though.
Maybe there were days when all Usenet servers had all hierarchies. I’m probably too young.
For those who are unfamiliar with the Spotweb client for Spotnet:
Spotweb is a Spotnet implementation in PHP. Spotnet only shows actual Spots - spots are manually created by humans which categorize them and provide an image and description for the spot. You cannot compare Spotweb with for example Newznab or other such systems as its a moderated and curated system with manual intervention.
This makes Spotweb slightly slower for new content but should most likely raise the bar on quality - depending on the Spotters.
Spotarr is an alternative client.
What is a Spot?
A spot includes a downloadable file and accompanying metadata and is intended to be shared with other users. A spot can be compared to a traditional search engine index entry. However, the difference is that it is user-generated and is intended to help people identify, organize, and share content.
The layman would think of it as a file. So music, movies, text, whatever.
Anybody tried this Spotnet thing in practice? How do the results rank vs centralized indexers?
I’m running SpotWeb to browse spots. It’s kind of a curated list of NZBs. So, most things you can find a spot for, are still actually available to download.
It was heavily used by the Dutch to distribute movies with baked-in (“ingebakken”) Dutch subtitles for older media players.
Sorry so this is a prowlarr-like?
So is this just like a free usenet indexer? If so does it get more takedowns because there's no account?
Wait it wants to connect to a provider as well, is this a Usenet downloader with its own indexer system built in?
So, I'm a little behind the times here... should I be moving away from torrent search sites to this new fangled spot stuff?
Well, it depends.
This specific application here is for usenet, so it is of no use to those who torrent.
If you do casual coughs torrenting and search for your stuff once in a while and download on your main machine, then no. Theres no need for anything else.
If you self host a media server, maybe a torrent client on the same machine, an arr stack can help out with it to the point that you will no longer visit a torrent site again. Once set up, instead of searching directly on a specific site, you would visit a self hosted page for say, movies, and search there. The search would be handled by another self hosted app which would search from a list of torrent sites you configured.