It's an abandoned wasteland with little pockets of people still talking about stuff. You can generally say whatever you want on it and even the left leaning crowd that's left on there are 50 year old computer nerds who are anti-censorship. If you join something like a Star Wars or Star Trek community there may be 2-3 posts a month. There are providers such as
AIOE that allow you to create and read text posts without an account over an encrypted connection. If you use a VPN and then an encrypted connection to connect to the provider's servers there is virtually no risk of getting doxed.
Safer yes, easier no. It is safer for two reasons:
1) You Usenet connection is generally encrypted, your connection to the torrent is not. This is why people say you should only use torrents if you're using a VPN.
2) Torrents are peer to peer. You upload to others as you download. Usenet is one way, you only download. When people are sued for tens of thousands of dollars while torrenting, it's done in civil court with the logic that every person you uploaded a part of the file too cost the movie studio a sale. So if you seeded a part of the torrent to 1,500 people and the movie costs $10 on itunes, they argue you cost them $15,000. If you were only downloading, you can at most be found liable for a single copy of the movie in civil court.
You generally have to pay for binary access on Usenet, and you have to pay for a good search engine to find things to download. There are plenty of tutorials for downloading from Usenet. I won't tell you how to do it here, because the last thing we need is more retards on it posting about it on Facebook and shit attracting government attention. If you can't figure out how to do it yourself by searching around, you're too retarded for it.
The biggest thing Usenet has going for it both in terms of downloads and censorship is it's too obtuse for most people to figure out. Yes, entering server addresses and port numbers is over most people's heads. Sad but true.
