I loved USENET back in the day, but it doesn't do what it used to.

Pure, or nearly pure text boards are still useful, but that's how I use Lemmy now. I just wish it had more general buy-in.

Honestly, you could look at USENET as federation before federation needed to be a thing. Way back when it was all hosted mostly on university servers. Lemmy seems to me to be very much the heir to USENET.

Well, I'm here rather than on Usenet. Overall, I think that the Threadiverse is preferable

Usenet had real spam problems for a long time.

But if you want some benefits:

• Wide range of powerful, mature clients with extensive filtering functionality, offline reading support.

• Better client-side accessibility. I mean, you can be blind and use a screenreader or something on Usenet. Going to be a lot less ideal on the Threadiverse.

• Comment editors are probably better than the in-browser textarea editors or clients with limited text-editors that I've seen (though the Threadiverse has Markdown as a standard, which I think is generally preferable). Though I haven't been browsing Usenet in some time, and maybe they have MIME-encoded Markdown or HTML or something as a common thing now.

• More-standardized support for posting embedded binaries.

• Commercial service is available. It's great that people donate their time and funds to make Threadiverse servers run, but there's something to be said for the resources available from commercial service. There's nothing stopping someone from running a commercial Threadiverse instance, but AFAIK, nobody presently is doing so.

• Newsgroups are more discoverable than are communities on the Threadiverse

you really need to use the https://lemmyverse.net/ index to find any communities out there, as otherwise you'll only see it once the exact name "!community@instancename" has been searched for on your local instance. Usenet (mostly) propagated newsgroups everywhere.

• Probably a larger userbase, though I haven't dug up current numbers. Certainly a different group and set of interests.

• Some PGP use and client support.

• I would bet that Usenet servers can scale up to more load than can Threadiverse servers.

Usenet gave me my first girlfriend.

i use a browser/mail client called seamonkey and their official community is on usenet. other than that pretty much every community seems dead sadly. honestly lemmy is much easier to use for me.

Is USENET used for piracy mostly?

In line with nostalgia, some kind of tourism. People dress up as vikings and practice with axes, even though they don't remember the good ol' days of raiding monasteries.

Usenets great, pure text, tons of topics, its great. Same with Fidonet etc. Only downside is ISPs pushed it out to make access harder now.

Text is faster than a web browser. No JS. High quality conversations.

Sailing the high seas.

Relative anonymity

I don't know how Usenet works, but how is it anonymous? If it has central servers, police can just ask them for your IP address. If it's peer to peer, police or others can just participate and log your IP address.

I mean that is from the perspective of using it for piracy. Or what exactly do you mean by anonymity?

How can one access Usenet on an iPhone ?

But don't you pay for its use, like providers and indexers? Seems archaic, and I've never had enough good reasons to use it so I'm curious what others say. If I did, I was a teenager and probably didn't understand what I was using anyway.

Same reason people use the tildeverse its good and pure.