Not for me…

That still involves a process where my butt hole gets wet.

I don’t like the wet feeling.

Honestly reddit.com/r/usenet was the best but we know how that’s going. You can web search but basically you pay for a provider, sign up for indexers who are like torrent trackers and provide .nzb files. You use either SABnzbd or NZBGet to download the actual files. Sonarr and Radarr are automation tools. There’s some other concepts like retention and backbones but that’s not as important to get started.

https://frugalusenet.com/ is a good provider to get started. https://www.nzbgeek.info/ and https://nzbplanet.net/ are good indexers for beginners. I recommend SABnzbd over NZBGet as I don’t think get is actively being developed for anymore.

https://trash-guides.info/ is very good for Sonarr/Radarr set up but it can be quite overwhelming for non-technical users or beginners.

I also just remembered cache exists so poke around https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZU9NxnpPelwJ:https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/faq/&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

I gave up on torrents a while ago and just focus on Usenet. It cost money (~$3/mo for a provider and another ~$2-3/mo for indexers) but it’s encrypted and doesn’t rely on P2P.

Also don’t forget that DVDs exist if you want to go a more legal route.

The best thing that can happen is development on Lemmy or other alternatives actually makes progress.

I should say that Reddit without RES would probably be much closer to what I’m seeing on Lemmy now.

Why? It’s a less mature platform with less features and not enough content. I get the idea of it being attractive but it’s like Mastadon without the content you’ve got an uphill climb.

Are you familiar with what’s going on over at Reddit right now?

So can I not have my home page only be the communities I subscribe to by default?