Could this become a "Caring is Sharing" sub, just like the old days
For too long imo, piracy had become a "grab it all" environment. The old "Caring is Sharing" mantra seems to have disappeared. So maybe, this Lemmy could revert back 20-30 years to become a real sharing community. IDK.
In a similar vein people on soulseek who have all their files locked unless you trade with them, particularly the ones who want gift vouchers and shit like that I feel goes against the community spirit of piracy as a whole. If I get hold of something rare or that has broken street date i'm excited to share it with others who may no be able to get it for whatever reason.
Really pisses me off scrolling through my search results seeing loads of lock symbols with user info listing demands that must be met for you to be oh so privaledged enough to receive a right to download from them. It goes against what I grew up knowing piracy to be, I'm guessing I am a similar age to you though.
And to all you soulseek users listing locked files with lists of demands to access them. Fuck you.
That's such a weird attitude to have. I LOVE when I see people have downloaded mp3s or comics off me. Makes me feel like I'm a better person having shared.
Are they even legit? I always assume that's some kind of a scam. That they don't actually have the files, but generate them based on incoming searches to get people to pay them. Because no matter what you are looking for, somehow there is always this one guy who as everything... neatly sorted and locked.
But either way, they are scum and should be ignored.
Im pretty sure, at least in my case, they do have the files. The music I play is pretty damn niche so it wouldnt be worth it for someone to try and run a scam like that imo. Although for more mainstream stuff that could be a possibility, but then if it is more popular usually there are many people sharing it unlocked.
Yeah that is annoying as hell. Like I get it if it's just like "my files are private, I'll open them if you have shares" but that whole "I need X album FLAC and a $50 baskin robbins gift card and then I might share with you" shit is the lamest thing I've ever seen.
I used Soulseek for a while, though I eventually stopped because there wasn't anything interesting there for me. Just music. Music is cool, but I'm mainly looking for ROMs, and not just the stuff anyone can find in any No-Intro set within five seconds of googling.
The ONLY reason I still use soulseek is weird obscure shit you can't find anywhere else. I'm talking some folk-punk singer songwriter from bumfuck, Indiana who toured the country twice in a 3yr span and disappeared into obscurity by 2008. You won't find that anywhere except local record shops in that town, or slsk in my experience.
Have been doing this stuff for more years than most of you have been alive, ha,ha!!
In the early days of torrents, seeding was a key feature to keep the post alive. But now it seems too many just want to download and fuck off, with absolutely no seeding back. Why is that? They just download something, then it’s fuck off to anyone else who might want to download it?
To me the basic spirit of sharing has gone. Maybe I’m just an old cunt now, but to me it’s a real shame.
This is because many countries only have laws that prevent providing pirated content and not downloading it. This means downloading content is almost never illegal, but providing it(seeding) is.
Yeah pretty much where I’m at. I have to be careful not to seed basically at all, otherwise I’ll get angry letters from my ISP. Kinda sucks, and most if not all VPN services charge money to be able to use torrenting over them. But maybe someday I’ll work out a system.
I usually keep stuff to seed until 3.0 ratio or longer if I'm keeping the files. If it's just taking really long and I need the drive space at 1.0 or even earlier. That should be ok right?
If you don't have the space to be able to keep things around, that's understandable, but less than 1.00 is considered to be leeching and is frowned upon. You've given back less than you've taken. I consider 2.00 a fair minimum, as you've returned twice as much as you've received to the ecosystem. 3.00 when and where you can is more than most will do, I think.
I just keep things seeding until I need more space, then I'll remove things based on ratio, average upload per day, and how much I want to keep the torrent alive. For example Queen Charlotte ratio is at 81.12, I don't really like it but since a lot of people want it I'm keeping it up. Alternatively for anime it's mostly a ratio of 2-3 but because I know how few people actually seed anime I keep it up (doesn't hurt that it's only like 1 GiB per episode too). As for removals I'm probably gonna remove High On Life soon since it's pretty heavy at 35.98 GiB and only has a ratio of 4.67 after 2 weeks.
I set up a vm for torrents so I could seed as much as possible without affecting other things I had to do. I have been seeding for 100 days minimum per torrent. Nothing worse than a torrent with no seeds.
I feel like when you are young or first starting you may not have the hardware to keep seeding. But after some time you setup a system and then should pay it back by always seeding as long as possible.
The thing with piracy these days is there is a huge fear of legal burden AND extreme protectiveness to prevent takedowns. It's the same thing as being a gang member and suspicious of new blood being undercover cops. Once you find actual piracy that works, the last thing you want to do is post publicly about it!
It used to be that just being on the internet made you trusted enough to get the warez. I don't know how to keep the movement alive with big brother watching out for his homies so hard. Decentralize, encrypt and anonymize I suppose. BT needs an overhaul to prevent attribution. Ten bucks says it's easily possibile but the VPN companies who have our back will lobby against it, lol.
Because for years I’ve been told that “they” target the uploaders, not the downloaders for prosecution. So seeding was significantly riskier that just downloading with uploads disabled.
Anyway, now I’ve set up a paid VPN and cancelled most streaming services, and uploads are fully engaged.
for years I’ve been told that “they” target the uploaders, not the downloaders for prosecution.
Yep. Once the RIAA proved that suing individual pirates for ridiculous amounts of money over one song did nothing to stop piracy, they finally changed gears: go after the people leaking the albums, the original upload groups, etc.
Governments, watchdog groups, and industry "concerns" followed suit, so eventually everyone learned that if you weren't a part of a group, you were probably (reasonably) safe. Then they started monitoring swarms on public trackers and sending those DMCA notices en masse, but that again proved how ineffective those scare tactics were. Most people switched to private trackers to avoid that annoyance, and pirates pivoted yet again.
So seeding was significantly riskier that just downloading with uploads disabled.
Seeding wasn't the only risk. Just being in the swarm -- whether uploading or downloading -- is enough to trigger a DMCA complaint. And the way BitTorrent works, you're pretty much always seeding even if the file isn't done downloading, so downloading and not seeding wasn't enough.
VPNs are a great shield against those fishing complaints, but you wanna make sure to use one that has had to prove in court that they never keep logs. A lot of them say they don't keep logs, but happily and quietly comply to subpoenas with whatever they have on customers.
Some providers offer the ability to upload. That said, it is potentially a risky action and most would suggest that unless you are very sure about what you are doing, and take proper precautions, it is not worth the risk for the average pirate. Providers get a LOT of DMCA takedowns, so unless you have something really obscure that you feel would be worth uploading, it probably isn’t something to attempt. YMMV.
As others have said, lack of privacy is what makes BitTorrent not the best tool.
Other things may be inconvenient (like good old XDCC or using Google Disk for piracy), or "invisible Joe" (like ed2k, gnutella and Usenet, due to all of these just not being sufficiently monitored by law enforcement or neighbors interested in your porn taste) cases.
And Freenet, I2P (with iMule and what else there is, there was some sharing thing similar to ed2k in experience), RetroShare are not sufficiently popular.
In general good things are not popular.
My point is, let's wait for Locutus and whether it succeeds in transforming the Web.
Sure, but it doesn't mean it won't cause problems for our kind admin, Ernest. Eventually, someone will probably make it troublesome enough for him to reconsider.
Yeah, I'd prefer it to be a resource educating and assisting people to the best options to go to than to actually be sharing direct file links or anything like that. There's other sites that are handling that side.
It's worth remembering that morality has little to do with it. Back then, sharing was simple and consequence-free. Now it's not. If you want to create a community like that, it needs to be a curated space where only people who are able to share can join.
I was not born 30 years ago, but I'd like to embrace more the "caring is sharing" mantra. I wonder what's your 'workflow'/management of your uploads to seed? as in it takes storage and so on, so what are your best practices folx?
2.00 for anything I download and isn't broken or garbage
5.00 for anything small, popular, or that I'm passionate about
Probably going to bump that up higher for some things, it's been slow lately
I only recently got the ability to seed long-term and privately. I don't bother with private trackers and don't expect I ever will. That's partially because I don't care about new shows or movies, and partially because I don't like exclusionary communities. My setup is virtualized, not on dedicated hardware, so I don't have a lot of space to throw at this. I'm a small fish in a big pond and I focus on keeping alive things that I've enjoyed.
Born 35 years ago, was a teen during the rise of torrents.
I have a hard disk dedicated to transient torrents. Separate hard disk for archival and perma seed.
Everything goes into transient with minimum ratio of 5.0 by default (I forgot the minimum time, but it's probably two weeks or a month). Sometimes I upgrade good things and upgrade them to archival and set them to seed forever.
I do remember capping my upload to 50% or so of my maximum upload, as well as limiting the number of downloading torrents (5) as well as active connections per torrent (around 100). You'll have to play around with this one to suit your own connection.
After that I just use without much thought, and only remove torrents that have automatically stopped without much worry.