I am no expert but I learned enough to set it up with my *arr stack and it’s my primary ship for sailing the seas. My use case is English language popular content. So YMMV.

Search for the Usenet backbone map or usenet provider map. You will see that there are only a handful of companies providing different “backbones”. Content may be different on different backbones and the copyright takedown notices may be different (DMCA or NTD).

I pay for an unlimited subscription from a provider on one backbone and purchased a couple of 500gb blocks (on sale) on another backbone. (A block is a one-time fee that allows me to download a specified amount of data, from a provider, and they don’t expire).

My understanding is that content on Usenet is broken into multiple parts and the file names are obfuscated, making it more difficult to take down. If they are taken down, it might only be a few parts. Your download client can be configured to download the missing parts from multiple servers (in my case the blocks).

I don’t recall finding something in my indexers that wouldn’t download because of takedowns.

My recommendation would be to try it with blocks or the cheap €2 providers to see if you are happy. If you struggle to find content branch out.

I don’t use VPN with Usenet. I don’t want to bottleneck those sweet 500/600 Mbps download speeds. Never had an issue. Edit: because I setup the SSL servers)

Usenet is not the WWW. It operates on a different protocol and methods. It’s not over HTTP(s) like this or standard web sites. Thus, your typical web user won’t even ever see or notice anything on or about usenet. This is why you would need a usenet provider or access. You cannot access usenet with a web browser. One notable difference between the web and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another in so-called news feeds. Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local servers.

Usenet is literally just a collection of text files on various servers or locations. There really isn’t an index builtin or a way to just ‘click to the next page’. This is why you need an indexer. An indexer crawls and scrapes usenet headers to allow searching and finding of specific content or posts. It automatically builds releases and indexes them like google indexes the internet.

When someone uploads files to usenet, it’s just text. Very large files such as videos, aren’t easily represented as text and don’t “fit” in one post. It is spread over many different posts, sometimes hundreds. In text format. You could find all those posts, combine the text, and end up with an actual video or music file. But that file doesn’t “exist” on usenet as a specific, single, item. Indexers find all posts associated with something you may be searching for, and other news reader software (like NZBGet or SABNZB) combine all those text files into one, giving you the file you actually expect after downloading all the different posts/parts.

Using a VPN account with usenet is beneficial, but not required. It is ideal to have access to multiple different indexers to find the posts you want.

It has been a while since I used Usenet, so instead of giving you possibly out of date info I will just link to this FYFM section which has way more info than I can give.

In particular I found this guide to be fairly easy to follow.

As for using a VPN: it can’t hurt!