No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
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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Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
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That's it.
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Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
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Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
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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 is a decentralized network that works very much like the fediverse here. Anything uploaded to one server gets sent out to all the servers; that's why you can log onto lemmy.world and see posts made on say lemm.ee. Likewise something posted to one usenet server gets sent out to all the others. And these servers are being operated by individual entities (again, much like lemmy). Whoever owns the server you're downloading from is having to pay for everything it sends out. Which is why most of the free ones will let you access the text portions but not the file downloads.
A VPN isn't necessary. But you do need a special program to connect to usenet. It's built into a lot of older email clients (thunderbird is a good option).
There's no one single usenet company for the same reason there's no one single lemmy instance. (I'm sure someone has explained it better somewhere else in this post).