I remember sitting around waiting for doom to drop on usenet and then go snag it from wuarchive. Then the message pops up 'its here its here' in the body 'my salad shooter is here'. To that troll I salute you good sir. You got me.
Back in the stone age, you just needed someone that would let you connect to their server. The whole point is that it's distributed, not a central, closed system. That server might have limits on the groups they wanted to host through them (e.g. the binaries groups), but you could do a lot with that. UUCP was the protocol used for batching and unbatching file transfers, which served both Usenet messages and email. (I had both on my Amiga, through dialup, for some years.)
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 22.9 ms ] threadAlso people posting from Google Groups no longer sends their posts to USENET. That means spam has dropped quite a bit.
There are a few free providers you can use to access USENET, a simple search should bring them up.
The last time I tried (probably about a decade at this point) it was pretty much entirely spam.
But if Google Groups doesn't send out to USENET, is it just its own closed system like Yahoo Groups used to be or something?
I do not know as I never used it after they killed the old dejanews interface. But Google did cut it off from USENET sometime last year.