To get started, I’d say to get a cheap block account from the Reddit Usenet deals wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/. A block account gives you a fixed amount of download (1TB, 2TB, whatever) that lasts indefinitely. If you use it just for music or books (for example), one block could last you a very long time. If you find yourself needing more data, you can get a monthly subscription with unlimited data.

You also need an indexer, which is how you search for content. DrunkenSlug, NZBGeek, and NZBPlanet are popular. These cost money, but sometimes they have a lifetime plan where you just pay once. Sometimes they have open registration, but other times you need to get an invite from an existing user. There’s free indexers like NZBKing, but they’re often full of junk, and lack encrypted content.

SABnzbd is the most popular downloader software. It’s free and open-source.

• Add account to SAB.
• Search for what you want on the indexer.
• Download the nzb file (points to where the files are located on Usenet) and add it to SAB to download the contents.

I think that’s it for the basics. There’s more to it - different backbones have different data so one provider might have data that a different provider is missing , you can fully automate downloads with Lidarr/Radarr/Sonarr/Readarr, you can aggregate results from multiple indexers using NZBHydra/Prowlarr - but you can figure that out as you go :)

• KaZaA, Limewire & Bearshare - P2P for the masses

There’s still a few P2P systems from that era that are still around. Soulseek is still doing very well for music, and some users on there have a bunch of things you can’t easily find anywhere else. DC++ and eMule/eDonkey2000 are still around but with much smaller networks.

One of the OG P2P file sharing methods (dating back to 1990) is still around too - IRC DCC.

Interesting - I didn’t see that. They say “You can add your own copyright as well”, so you don’t have to give up your rights to the code. They do still need to comply with the terms of the Apache license.

Their contribution agreement forces you to give up copyright to them.

The license just looks like the standard Apache license though, which doesn’t require this. With the Apache license, contributors still own the copyright to their code, but they license it to the project. Did you see a document in the repo that says something different?

if you need a POSIX interface

SSHFS isn’t POSIX compliant. It doesn’t support hard links, file locking, atomic renames, full support for changing file permissions, umasks, and probably other things.

Versity S3 Gateway is another option that’s trying to focus on simplicity. https://github.com/versity/versitygw

Out of all these, SeaweedFS is the most scalable. Seaweed’s design is based off some of Facebook’s whitepapers about their warm storage system, and it works especially well for use cases that have a very large number of small files (like images).

SSHFS is very unreliable. At least use NFSv4 or even SMB/CIFS.

Practically every other object storage provider offers an S3-compatible API.

Great redesign. The icons finally look distinct enough to differentiate them at a glance.

The Tasks icon looks like someone sat on it though.

I didn’t realise until now that the Drive icon combines the colours of Docs, Sheets and Slides. Clever icon.

Monochrome? It still works.

Maybe I just haven’t encountered any bugs that took a long time to fix. It’s been pretty reliable for me.

I’m a software developer that focuses on front end development (full-stack but I like frontend more) so I’m pretty picky about UI/UX. Boost feels very nice and polished.

I like Boost.

Last time I said this, I got shunned for recommending a closed-source app. I generally try to stick to open-source, but Boost has a good UI, works well, and bugs are fixed quickly.

If you’re fine pulling with legit services then https://monochrome.tf/ is probably the easiest to use (or their backend service if you want to automate it).

Musicbrainz is fine; it’s just Lidarr’s usage of it that’s a problem. Lidarr uses its own mirror of Musicbrainz, plus its own custom search code, and it’s not as reliable.

Other apps that use Musicbrainz data, like Beets and Picard, don’t have the same issues that Lidarr has.

Yes, unstructured. Every script is its own special snowflake that does things a bit differently.

There’s no guarantee of the verbs that the script implements. start, stop and restart are common, but the implementation is up to each individual script. I’m most familiar with Debian where some service (but not all) implemented it with start-stop-daemon, but other distros and OSes handled it differently.

Basic, commonly needed functionality, like restarting a crashed service after waiting for some delay, need to be implemented per app.

When sysvinit was widespread, there was a reason a lot of people used systems line supervisord to deploy services, rather than dealing with sysvinit scripts. It was a pain.

Systemd units were a logical progression from supervisord services.

Thanks for the info. It looks like there’s no way to migrate from Conduit. If I reinstall from scratch using the same domain, and create an account again, will everything still work properly including federation with other servers?

My server is just for myself.

What did you end up doing? I’m still running Conduit at the moment.

Do you have any actual problems with systemd, or do you just want SysV init scripts to stick around forever?

Maybe systemd isn’t the best, but it’s way better than a bunch of mostly unstructured shell scripts, and more secure (it’s pretty easy to reduce privileges, sandbox the filesystem, restrict syscalls, etc per service just by editing the unit file)

I use chezmoi and chezmoi_modify_manager to keep my dotfiles (including some KDE configs) in a Git repo, and it works well enough.