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.


I guess anything too convenient is bound to be attacked by lawyers.