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
    1·
    1 hour 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·
      46 minutes 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.