Don't let Shady Vance go near your couch cushions.

Wow, thanks for taking the time to type that explanation! Your response was much easier to understand vs what i got trying to google.

It's clear now that a private torrent tracker is more in line with what I originally wanted, but I'll hang around the Usenet community to try and learn more as it seems really cool. I kinda wish i found out about it 20 years ago but it's never too late to learn!

Nope you are correct, and I just revealed that im clueless about Usenet in a public forum... To a community of it's users 🤡.

Thanks for the explanation, now it's clicking in my brain why all of the Usenet trackers I hear about are all private... They likely wouldn't be around very long if they were distributing linux iso's from their own servers to the general public.