Yeah I totally get what you mean. Keep it mind that Usenet was already abandoned in the traditional sense by the time the warez scene took it over. Silver lining is that warez is keeping it alive. We could still keep it going in discussion groups.

Are you still using Usenet as it was meant for? Do you know of any newsgroup that are particularly active to this day?

It doesn’t see the interface if qbit is running in a docker container. That’s what gluetun is for.

so stuff has to be base64 encoded and split into pieces…

You say that like it’s an issue. With modern Usenet binary downloaders (SABnzbd) and indexers, you don’t have to browse groups. In fact you most likely can’t. The indexer provides you with the map where the files are located (the nzb files) and SABnzbd finds them, starts downloading them, checks if all files are downloadable and keeps going or stops if there aren’t even enough files available to attempt a repair.

All of that is abstracted from the user. You tell Radarr/Sonarr what movie/series you want and it will handle everything, from querying the indexers to passing the nzb along to SABnzbd and to automatically restart the process if somehow the download fails.

It’s a shame no one uses Usenet for its original purpose though. It was reddit before the internet itself.