I know I’m a couple of months late to this post, but I just joined Lemmy and found it… In a lot of ways, Usenet is just easier. Sure it takes a bit more to set it up - as you need not just a good provider but a good indexer - but once you set it up, it’s just so much easier to find the things you want vs. torrenting. In addition, as others have stated, the speed is very, very real. I use newsgroupdirect for my provider, and it’s not uncommon for me to be downloading at 100 Mbytes/sec (not bits - but bytes!). I’ve actually had a number of big downloads pause because the cache on my hard drive got filled up and it needed time to write the data from the cache to the disk.

I’d say Usenet has five big upsides when compared to torrents: 1.) Significantly faster 2.) Much more secure, as your connection to the server is SSL encrypted 3.) Piggybacking on 2.), no need for a VPN as a result of how you connect to the usenet provider 4.) No need to seed! For me this is huge, as I’ve always found seeding to be a real pain in the butt, especially when most people’s upload speeds are significantly slower than download speeds. So if you’re using any kind of tracker that requires keeping up with a certain ratio, you’ll be seeding for a lot longer than you download. 5.) With the right indexer(s), you really only need to search in a couple of places to find what you want - whereas I often find with torrents you need to jump from site to site to find what you need.

There are two big downsides to usenet though. 1.) It’s not free. You need to at least pay for a provider, but typically an indexer as well (there are free indexers out there, but they’re not the best). With that being said, torrenting isn’t really free either, as you typically need to pay for a VPN to ensure you don’t get caught by your ISP for violating the DMCA. And, if you’re using a private tracker, you might need to pay for a seedbox as well. 2.) DMCA takedowns are becoming more and more common. What that means is your indexer will find what you want to download, but then when you start to download the file, it fails. This typically happens because the file was removed the provider’s servers due to a DMCA takedown. Fortunately, I’ve usually been able to find the file I want, it just may not be there first one to pop-up in a search.

You don’t have to seed. Connections are secure and encrypted. Speed is generally much faster, and more reliable. Things will either download in full, or fail pretty quickly, no hoping that 1 seeder comes online. Things are often posted to Usenet before torrents.

There are drawbacks too though.