No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
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All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
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Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
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Same, just stopping by to see if anyone has any answers. Like, there needs to be a "how to usenet for dummies" guide that sets you up with the best usenet stuff and explains what each thing does and why you care.
Edit: also, in the era of free services, why do you still have to pay for Usenet access?
Edit 2: apparently my question is too dumb for "no stupid questions" lol.
Bandwidth costs money. And usenet isn't collecting and selling your info to recoup those costs like most "free" services. A lot of ISPs do offer free usenet access to customers, albeit somewhat neutered. You can browse the bulletin boards but most of the file downloads are going to be filtered out. That's the part you have to pay for.
Okay, but why the bandwidth costs? Is Usenet a separate network entirely? Do you have to use a VPN to connect to it? I'm honestly curious about it, it just seems alien compared to everything else. Why are there different usenet providers and not a single "Usenet" company?
Edit: someone else said that usenet is federated, which makes a lot more sense. I thought it was like a single host that the providers connected to, like isps.
Usenet and the message boards being referred to are 'proto-internet' services. Think BBS, where your computer dialed into a service, and you could interact with that builiten board, the messages and users on it, as well as any files it had available for download.
Usenet had newsgroups that were very diverse and specific, and originally were just like message boards, but at some point, the major remaining Usenet servers started just sharing to each other, or maybe more appropriately, they would reference each other.
As someone mentioned before, it's a protocol just like HTTP. There's a bunch of servers all hosting webpages made in hypertext, and we just jump between them with links. Likewise, there's a bunch of servers out there hosting newsgroups, but you have to find a gateway to get started. The reason there's no 'one' company is akin to asking why all websites aren't hosted/owned by one company.
If anything... It's kinda like lemmy/fediverse stuff. You make an account with one instance, but since the protocols are the same, you can use your account on that one instance to talk to the whole fediverse network, multiple instances.
Why it costs is because at this point, it's an archive. A huge archive, of not just text discussions, but also all the files that have been posted since a very long time ago. And just like the currently 'free' archive.org, it costs money to host all of that. Usenet is a bit less resource intensive than a modern website, so it can just basically sit... But they just ask that you pay to access it, pay to have an account. In this case, you're paying to access a network that is separated from the rest of the internet at large.