I mean, expensive by the standards of 1994, but -- inevitable comparison inbound -- a Raspberry Pi 4 has more CPU, more IOPS, more storage, and more RAM than many a 1994 small-ISP Usenet server. And modern Linux is a heck of a lot nicer to work with than any of the OS back then. A T1 is 1.5Mb/s, and if you don't take binaries, you would not quite fill that pipe back then.
These days, a $10/month VPS is not merely adequate, but luxurious for a non-binaries feed.
It's an almost irrelevant question because as soon as most nodes would stop carrying alt.binaries, posters would no longer respect the convention that binaries should go there, because users would want the data regardless of what their provider wants. Them it's a cat and mouse game like everything else, where binaries would just be split up more and obfuscated more.
When the cost of storage and compute isn't really borne by the users, content limits are just challenges to overcome.
Maybe if there was a total messages or bytes limit per user it might prevent using it for binary distribution, but those are painful for users to the degree it might kill usage enough to kill any hope of it continuing.
These days I think that isn't true anymore. There are a lot more ways to share files now, so if you threw up enough barriers people who want to do it would just go find another platform.
I'd be completely fine with a Usenet type of protocol that disallows file attachments altogether, adoption might not be huge, but maybe that's fine - projects like Gemini and Mastodon are valuable for me even if they're not replacing the WWW and Twitter.
I agree with this. Why go to all the trouble of getting around barriers when I could just post a DHT address of a trackerless BitTorrent swarm in a post?
I meant per user monthly or weekly byte limits by the people running servers and allowing access, not message byte limits. I'm well aware of how usenet worked, and the fact they can just split into an arbitrary number of payload messages was the point I was making earlier in that comment.
The only way you can stop binary usage is if you limit the demand, as if there's demand the supply will find a way.
You can't limit what people want, but you can make them choose other avenues of getting it.
If you charge for transit on news server connections, people will naturally gravitate towards using it for lower size messages, which means they will go to unmetered connections for large downloads. Then not including alt.binaries in our server is less likely to have people looking for and utilizing methods to still get binaries through your service in different ways.
Theres huge differences in outcome based on how you attempt to limit demand. None are perfect, but just opting out of carrying binaries is the equivalent of the drug war, where they make the materials and transfer of them illegal. I'm not even sure how to stretch the metaphor to what I'm talking about, because the national policy on drugs and the drug war seems like a very poor fit.
A good metaphor might be the postal system. The old news system was like if the post office didn't charge per message or weight, just a flat monthly fee. Removing alt.binaries is like the post office then said they don't want you shopping g anything over 50 lbs because it's clogging all the delivery vehicles shipping large things. What I'm proposing is them giving you a total cumulative weight allotment per month you can't go over (or you get charges a lot). Demand will obviously respond to that, and people will opt for other methods to ship heavy things.
How expensive was Usenet if you took out storage/bandwidth for alt.binaries.*?