I am wrong but you need to use usenet providers to download stuff right? So it's centralized and company based?

Yes, that's how Usenet works. Although it is federated.

I think your confusion is in thinking that Usenet is a centralized space. It isn't. Yes, you need a provider, but if one does carry what you want, you go elsewhere.

Highly recommend reading the wiki articlenon Usenet.

Replying to this before OP asks.

Usenet is distributed across hundreds (thousands maybe?) of servers. It's centralized in that setting up your own server and getting the same access as joining an existing Usenet server is going to be very difficult (and with Usenet being used for privacy more and more, could be impossible due to admins not trusting a random new person), but in theory one could.

Usenet came long before torrenting.

I somewhat agree. I think it’s fine people use usenet. But it’s not my cuppa tea. I’ll stick to torrents :).

...is this process not against the spirit of piracy

It could be against the anti-establishment values of some digital pirates, but it's not at odds with the nature of piracy itself.

Piracy on the internet is just distributing digital goods protected by intellectual property law without the permission of the copyright holder. Some pirates engage in this practice for political reasons, but for many others it's simply a matter of economics or availability.

It is not new. I downloaded (copyrighted) porn movies from my ISP's own Usenet servers in the early 90s. On dialup. It was a decentralized, federated service before anybody even knew what decentralization or federation even meant or why they would want it. It was just assumed that everyone would want to run their own Usenet servers because the technologies of the time didn't allow direct, continuous, real-time connection between everybody. Sharing was expensive but running a Usenet server was relatively cheap and was a good way to share all that data to all of an ISP's users at once. It was ALWAYS an option to use it for piracy, and people did.

Nowadays, sharing is cheap, and running Usenet servers is expensive, so almost nobody runs their own Usenet servers, especially not ISPs. But that's not the technology's fault, it's just the way the world has changed. The internet is a very different place now, and we use it in different ways. Usenet, on the other hand, has not changed at all. Only the people using it have changed.

Usenet has splintered into text and piracy. Text is low volume and many servers can peer with yours for free. Piracy is more centralized, gets spammed like half a petabyte every day, we know that because 99% of "the posts" never get downloaded even once, it's commercial because of the huge storage requirements.

With modern Usenet there are about 8 or so backbones used for file sharing. Your Usenet provider/server would connect to one or more of these backbones.

Its true Usenet is designed for federation, and in the 80s and 90s it was thousands of servers but today commercial Usenet providers just resell these 8 backbones.

I found about Usenet and the sort of “hype” relative to it and I wonder some stuff.

Usenet's been around in its current form since 1987! The problem for pirates is finding decent providers who serve binaries. I used to use Easynews as they had great retention and they seem to still be around.

Usenet is decentralised, but - as mentioned elsewhere - relies on a handful of providers to service the binary groups.

what wiki article? just browsed and i'm not seeing anything other than a glossary entry

Sorry about the confusion. I meant Wikipedia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

If no one server carries all the parts of a multi-part, is that a legal loophole?

Usenet is older than torrenting. Significantly older. Even older than the WWW IIRC... Every few years the newer generation "discovers it" and realizes you can totally saturate your connection, even with relatively obscure things that would typically need a significant number of seeds to be able to do.

And then it falls to the wayside again, because retention times kinda suck as no one wants to keep petabytes of data for ultra-long term. That and most of the indexers still alive today fucking suck.

As someone who used to download C64 games in the 1980s, from a BBS, trust me. Pirating existed decades before BitTorrent.

Decades.

usenet is decentralized at server level. In theory all the servers have the same content. Currently everything is obfuscated because of the take downs - so you need an indexer (the users upload the nzbs to that website. Think of a nzb like a .torrent file.)

There are more than just 8 separate usenet servers that are out there. Many might not carry binaries but that does not define a usenet server. https://top1000.anthologeek.net/top1000.current.txt

Aha got it, thank you! Fwiw, you sent me down a rabbit hole on fmhy so I'm learning lots today.

I’m aware. You may have missed that I made that distinction in my first sentence.