This was when a 14.4k modem was the last word in speed, and you were literally paying your phone company by the minute for a connection. Public access to Usenet required access through an ISP, who would also charge - separately - by the minute.
Modems were very optional, because not everyone had that kind of money.
At 14.4k it takes maybe 10 seconds to download a JPEG, and tens of minutes to hours to download a low-res video clip.
Neither Usenet nor Fidonet had anything like a browser. Files had to be converted to ASCII for upload, often in parts, and then glued back together and converted to the original format manually using various helper applications.
2400 baud was the gold standard. 9600 and then 14.4k came latter. I stuck on 300 baud for a while and rejoyced when I got a 1200 baud modem for a birthday - then lightning took it out...
Usenet was reading was free via the local university unsecured dial-in (not ppp just a terminal that would telnet into any computer you knew of) , but without an email address you couldn't do much so I didn't spend much time there. Fido and the other local bbs systems provides free accounts that made the whole thing useful.
Then the web hit and you could find useful things on the internet. It was all downhill from there for Usenet.
Remember when yEnc showed up, and discovered that most NNTP servers could actually deal with mostly 8-bit bodies, and it made transferring files that much more efficient?
It's still used in binary groups to this day. It's too bad that it never really was used in email and most email clients didn't support it.
IIRC, NNTP, SMTP, and I believe IMAP servers do not treat any character as significant from a protocol standpoint other than ascii NULL (0x00), CR (0x0D), LF (0x0A), and . (0X2E) (the last only when at the beginning of a line). Those are the only 4 characters that yEnc escapes for encoding purposes.
There was also quite a lot of hijacking of military, corporate, and university bandwidth at the time for Usenet. Dump to floppies and take it home. Often faster than a modem from beginning to end.
There was also quite a lot of hijacking of military, corporate, and university bandwidth for Doom. Doom had very chatty, unoptimized netcode (which Quake would later improve upon) and networked Doom was banned outright at many sites for starving legitimate users of bandwidth.
I think I was still using Fidonet and Usenet even when I had 33.6K in mid 90s and also 56K, although at 56K by the end of 90s I already switched to internet paid per hour, but Usenet groups were for me really internet thing already, good predecessor of Reddit and various PHP forums.
Fidonet was practical - possible to download all groups/messages at once for lot of offline reading and responding saving lot of money for lot of content.
Modems were very optional, because not everyone had that kind of money.
At 14.4k it takes maybe 10 seconds to download a JPEG, and tens of minutes to hours to download a low-res video clip.
Neither Usenet nor Fidonet had anything like a browser. Files had to be converted to ASCII for upload, often in parts, and then glued back together and converted to the original format manually using various helper applications.
It was still exciting and fun though.