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.
Public trackers never seem to have as good of releases or swarm health, except for the most popular content.
see, I don’t really do popular (except for the kids) and private trackers just seemed like too much hard work
Keep seeding and your ratio goes up, even if people aren’t downloading the file.
Or, donate to the site.
Most people do the former and that’s perfectly fine.
Donating means either having a trace that links you to an illegal entity, or getting into the crypto mess
which leaves the trace as well, don’t kid yourself that crypto is anonymous