Back in the old days, when a file sharing service got found out by corporations and started sending nasty letters, people stopped using that service.
Too bad the torrenting generation never learned that lesson and now torrenting is just one big clusterfuck of “seekret club” sites and paying (VPNs) to pirate, which is laughable.
I wish more pirates used I2P. But it seems like many cannot deal with waiting a day for their download to finish.
Any good tutorial on using I2P in combination with tools like transmission or aria? Don’t matter to wait a day or a week…
I even hate same day expedition on online shops… never understood why people have the urge to want to have it within a day.
I don’t know of a tutorial, but most tools have to have support for I2P built in, otherwise they won’t work. A good torrent client that does is qBittorrent.
Browsing I2Ps network with HTTP happens over a SOCKS5 proxy, so if aria supports that, you can use it too. https://geti2p.net/ should have more information.
(Giving me flashbacks to the days of the Slyck forums!)
As first torrents, then cyberlockers, and then streaming came to dominate, the other P2P networks and programs did one of the following:
- Shrunk to a much smaller number of users but still linger on.
- Software stopped being developed, domain name lost
- Purposely closed down to avoid legal consequences
- Pivoted to something else (like legal downloads or streaming e.g. Napster, Audio Galaxy, or a different P2P network, e.g. Limewire went from Gnutella to BitTorrent to… web file transfer?)
Every now and then, I try a Kad/ed2k client but soon return to torrents. E.g. a few months ago I tried out aMule on Linux… and got a LowID. 23 years after I first started using it, I still can’t dodge LowID 😂 It does have content, though.
Compared to previous times I revisited Kad/ed2k, some sites/services with ed2k links have now finally disappeared: MoTV (Ministry of Television), TV Underground, ShareTheFiles. I think VeryCD is still going though.
Shareaza is still a thing (at least, a fork of it is), still claiming to be the one P2P app to rule all the networks. One of only three clients left (according to Wikipedia) that still access the Gnutella network.
Just to see what’s up, I installed Gtk-Gnutella (last updated March 2024). I can find a few things in searches, but still waiting for them to begin to download. UPDATE: One just started downloading, although the speed is max 50 Kib/s, ETA is at least a few hours.
I might give a Soulseek client a try, as a hard drive full of music I got from Soulseek in 00s recently died (yes, it lasted 15 years!), and Soulseek seems to be the music P2P that never dies (and has a Linux client).
PS I don’t think Retroshare is a “new iteration”; it’s been going since 2006!
To my knowledge, both eMule and DC++ are still active, but I think private trackers have become the more dominant technology for file sharing.
