Comment by ValdikSS
14 hours ago
Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West.
Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct.
I have a p2p sharing websites bookmarks which I collected about 5 years ago, 60% of them are dead now.
Private (invite-only) West sharing websites are still alive though, but are supported mostly by beefy enthusiasts who seed everything via a seedbox elsewhere, not in their home country on their residential connection.
Rutracker went the other way: they organized donation collection to buy the HDDs to the 'saviours' group, a one-time investment compared to the datacenter server cost. In RU/UA, people usually seed from home.
Fun fact: Rutracker is one of the few remaining places on the internet where random Russians and Ukrainians talk respectfully to each other, and do so in Russian.
Isn't this largely because bandwidths got fast enough to not need P2P for music any more? You can use SLSK which is DirectConnect-style, or direct downloads, or Spotify/YouTube downloaders.
I haven't used a public site since Suprnova so I don't know about the health of public p2p sites at all. The private side is absolutely not stagnant, new sites pop up all the time and you can still find all the niche stuff you want to find by just nudging the enthusiasts with requests.
A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.
Yes, that's true, but the core reason there are private p2p sites is because you're most likely to get a DMCA violation letter from the watchdog company via your ISP or to you directly in the West.
Even if it may be not a punishable offense, that still freaks out people, and they choose not to seed from home or use public websites which are scraped by DMCA watchdogs.
I don't see much point in contributing to closed silos (even if I'm present on the majority of invite-only music trackers and occasionally contribute there) because I have ThePirateBay and RuTracker account: it's the same, but it's open for everyone and google-able.
Some private trackers disallow accessing them via VPN, which I find super strange. They want to access the website with your residential connection, but they allow seeding via VPN (which many do, because see above).
Other private tracker which I used to be on had a timeout on account life time. If you don't log in once in a while (6 months AFAIR), your account will be suspended, even if you're seeding all the content in the torrent client all this time.
I think for normal people, private trackers seem inaccessible and might as well not exist. When I was a kid, I had gobs of free time and spent most of it dialing into BBS systems, learning who to contact, and navigating the scene's trust network, just to get invites to warez sites. Now that I'm an adult, I'm a lame Casual, too busy living my life to have time to sit there figuring out the secret handshake needed to get an invite to Private Tracker X.
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Soulseek is still going strong last time i checked
Well they shadowban the accounts which share copyrighted content for which they receive copyright claims.
It's a centralized service, they just configure you account to be invisible in the search results of others.
And they don't check whether the file is really reachable. I've 'chmod 000' copyrighted files so they could not be downloaded (but still could be found in search), and Soulseek administrators were not happy with that ether.
I've been shadowbanned 4 times or so. They never unban, need new account.
Not doubting you but there are people with a quarter of a petabyte shared on slsk. I have a modest share of ~200GB, a good chunk of that from trigger happy record labels and never got banned. My client serves and average of 50-100 downloads a day no problem. So idk whats going wrong on your end.
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But it's free to make a new account. They know where their bread is buttered. Public file-sharing services have to make these fig-leaves about caring about copyright.
creating new account is like 3 seconds, you don't even need to register in any way, you just create random username and password you never need again
Indeed, Russia and Ukraine are the last major digital libraries of the history and culture of modern western civilization, which is deeply disturbing to write out in text, and says a lot about how far the west has fallen
> Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West.
Orpheus and RED are going extremely strong right now, with very active userbases
That's private p2p, not public.
Ah, my mistake!
Anime (an everything related) torrent sites are also pretty alive.
Oh no, these don't feel very well either, in a sense that there's only a few seeders of the older uploads, if at all, and by older I mean as old as just a few years old.
I'm running my torrent preservation service, and many anime/jrock/jpop downloads start downloading only after weeks or months of waiting for a seeder.
Groups and individuals who used to be active on the scene has switched elsewhere and retracted their archives and XDCC bots.
There are Chinese torrent-to-web download services which seem to cache already downloaded stuff for a very long time if not indefinitely, sometimes you can download it from there if someone managed to use the service (they don't seed it over bittorrent though).
Oh, year, in this sense - p2p is almost dead compare to times when I was frequentin animesuki forums or stoptazmo
There are also western ones. The keyword to look for is "debrid"
> Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct.
But rutracker is still going very strong, and shows up in every magnet link scraper.
> Private (invite-only) West sharing websites are still alive though, but are supported mostly by beefy enthusiasts who seed everything via a seedbox elsewhere, not in their home country on their residential connection.
I don't think this is true at all. I think most are seeded through simple residential connections. The main reasons people use seedboxes are because everybody has a laptop that travels with them and isn't powered up and networked all the time (rather than a desktop that is never turned off), or because they don't want to hear from their ISP. It's not because of "beefiness." The amount of data it takes to store or transfer an album is trivial.
I just think that a lot of people with very mainstream tastes drifted away from p2p as they realized that spotify etc. satisfied all their needs. The people left on private p2p are largely the people who trading things that aren't available on streaming, or who just don't like the streaming experience at all.
I think the enthusiast is beefy, not the computer. It's not P2P anymore, it's client/server with an enthusiast server and a casual user client.