There are now many technologies for P2P file sharing:

  • Usenet
  • Bittorrent
  • IPFS
  • Tenfinger
  • more?

And also several technologies for anonymization:

  • VPNs
  • Tor
  • I2P

AFAICT the most popular option is still Bittorrent with various public and private trackers and indexers. Private trackers seem to be the most effective option that communities have converged on.

I’ve tried all of the above solutions over the years and while I think something like I2P sounds great in theory, it doesn’t seem to actually work well in practice. Because it’s not terribly popular, it’s hard to know what to expect.

We clearly still haven’t found the ideal model that can provide both good performance, discovery, access, availability, and anonymity. But do you think we will actually make progress on these problems? We seem to have stabilized on a local maximum.

  • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nzEnglish
    31·
    12 days ago

    Ive trued private trackers, but there is very little for me to try and keep up the ratio them while on public my share ratio is well above 5.

    Public trackers and no vpn gets it done

      • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nzEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        see, I don’t really do popular (except for the kids) and private trackers just seemed like too much hard work

        • Damage@feddit.itEnglish
          1·
          12 days ago

          They’re certainly an imperfect solution, downloading shit you don’t care about just to build ratio, at least at first, seems really stupid.

          But you can’t argue with the quality of the content on good private trackers.

          • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            11 days ago

            Most private trackers have a point system where you accumulate points that you can exchange for upload credit, as a mean to provide an incentive to keep less popular torrents active.

            That way you can build up your ratio without downloading stuff you don’t want.