Usenet as daily driver works 99% of the time. Only use VPN/torrents for extremely new or very obscure shows. $5/month pays for unlimited Usenet and VPN.

When Hamachi became unusable I switched to Tailscale to connect my phone, my laptop, and all my local PCs together. It just works, flawlessly. There are more features they offer like Exit Nodes (proxy servers to force Internet traffic through another PC on your Tailscale Network) and sharing your tailnet nodes with another Tailscale user on a separate tailnet, but realistically I just use it like I used Hamachi - as a dead-easy VPN between all my personal devices.

I’m assuming 1172 is a count of donations to official mainstream servers. I have definitely contributed to my local server.