What Is Usenet and How Does It Work?
Usenet is a decentralised, worldwide network for posting and retrieving messages and files that predates the web itself. It sounds ancient — it is ancient, roughly as old as email — but in 2026 it’s still one of the fastest and most reliable distribution networks in existence. It just works differently to anything you grew up with on the modern internet. This is the plain-English version. No marketing, no scare stories, just how the thing actually works — including the two concepts that make it genuinely different from the modern web: retention and PAR2 repair. ...