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Just use one of the freely available text-only Usenet servers, like news.eternal-september.org, or choose to support a cheap one, like the excellent individual.net which costs just 10 euros (15 US dollars) per year.

Usenet is consolidating. It's not dying. Services like these continue to provide a spam-free, binary-free, high-quality Usenet feed.

even on a good dedicated Usenet server (I've used several - most recently Astraweb, but I've also used Teranews and Giganews in the past), any group that is not moderated is FLOODED with spam

If they are FLOODED with spam, they may be dedicated, but they are not good. In the newsgroups of my Usenet provider appears virtually no spam.

That's why I use a dedicated Usenet provider where I find virtually no spam in any newsgroups that I subscribe to. Of course, I have to pay for that added service, but that's a good investment.

With my provider, I don't see spam in the newsgroups that I subscribe to. I see less technical users leaving for their beloved Web fora, but that's actually a good thing. S2N ratio in many newsgroups almost returned back to the time before the AOL-me-too folks appeared.

news.individual.net is 10 Euro per year. Standard password protected NNTP protocol.

Text-only newsgroups. Extremely reliable service.

Get a well-maintained news server and there'll hardly be any spam. Unfortunately, such a thing is hard to find, there isn't really any money in text newsgroups, and regular ISPs continue to give up on Usenet altogether and recommend Google Groups (which is a cruel joke). Individual seems to be one of the remaining good servers, for EUR 10 per year, but it has a dedicated team behind it. For technical things like programming languages or databases, Usenet groups in comp.* are still great.

Usenet is still everything that you describe. I don't know why people keep insisting it's dead when in fact it's up and running and doing fine. (Maybe it's because Slashdot is a glorified web forum so is biased against Usenet use.) Just get a properly run text-only feed (I use news.individual.net for a nominal fee of EUR 10 per year which is about USD 15) and enjoy your spam-free text-based Usenet experience. You pay for it and not advertisers, so your privacy is safe. With a decent newsreader you get far better functionality in terms of threading, killfiles, speed, etc. than webforums have ever offered.

Free servers are free, but most of them suck -- they are unreliable, spam-ridden and badly managed. There are a few subscription-based (but rather cheap) servers without binary-groups caring for quality of service and spam-filtering. news.individual.net is one of them -- 10 EUR a year, great service with 25000 text-only groups and hardly any spam. Yeah, it feels strange to pay for Usenet access, but it's nearly as good as back then.

What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.

And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.

There are still many fringe groups worth reading and posting in. Most of these are much better than the average blog and much less work to follow. And if you happen to have access to a sanely managed server (like news.individual.net), spam is almost non-existent. As a rule of thumb avoid all servers carrying the binary groups.

Usenet ignorance is terrible. But Usenet was never very easy to begin with. For instance, how to do you start a new Usenet group (on that has to be replicated) - it's kinda hard, IIRC.

What I think is fucking shameful is Ubuntu and Apple developers promoting Usenet ignorance. Even Microsoft has newsgroups.

Some Usenet providers will grant you registration-fee-only access and no rights to binaries.

This news server is at the University of Berlin and costs 10 euros/year. No binaries.

http://news.individual.net/

Unfortunately, Usenet today is a paid service. It would be nice if somebody created a Usenet free-for-all non-profit (of course, no binaries).

If you're really about the discussions then there's Individual for 10 euros a year. Very good at sorting out spam.

It is so stupid that one wonders if Verizon has to go nice with Government of USA these days. I don't know the American system but generally, if a company does stupid things that will only make Govt. happy, they are going for a deal or something.

Well, Google groups and the Germany/.edu based http://www.individual.net/ to the rescue. Both doesn't carry bin groups. That is what they should do if they were concerned.

I recommend all newsgroup denizens with TW, Sprint, and Verizon sign up for news.individual.net. It's 10 euros per year (about $15) and there are no binary groups, but they do a better job of spam and sporge filtering than any ISP I've seen.

Who would've thought the day would come when you'd have to use a German news server to ensure freedom of speech.

Just don't carry alt.binaries.* and some other specific hierarchies and you're done.
For example news.individual.net does this.

just because one company can't compete does not mean the medium is dying.

Usenet died not long after Canter and Siegel.

*sigh* I remember the days where I could catch up on 50 newsgroups in under an hour, reading most of the threads too.

If I need information now, I hit google.

While it does not provide access to binary groups (for understandable reasons) it works really well for normal text groups. And it's free, all you have to do is registering: news.individual.net