Decentralization has always been the way for piracy, since many places inevitably go down throughout the years but it being spread out is what keeps everything from being taken down by a single closure. So while not convenient it makes it more resilient.
Similarly to I2P, IPFS sites can be relatively decentralized & censorship resistant; so, that & social features, are probably why Veilid was mentioned.
They’re intrinsically more suited to private cliques than public sharing, so I agree that they don’t really replace major public forums like TPB or the old KAT.
That said, TPB’s continual relaunches are about the best a well-known centralized public site can manage, on a system as oppressive as the corporate-run “internet” we have today.
It’s a lot harder to shut down P2P apps & devices, than websites on the clearnet.
This is a terrible idea. There’s plenty of resources out there that has links to everything you could ever want, why would it all need to be stored in one place. The piracy megathread has resources for everything you mentioned, with redundancies and multiple sources. It’s really not that hard to find anything you need. If I want a book I go to a certain site, if I want software or games I have 2 or 3 torrent sites, if I want to stream TV or movies I have dedicated sites for that. What good does putting it all in one spot do except make that a bigger target?
A lot of folks are talking about how a centralized repository would be a big target for governments, ISPs and rights holders, but I have a different angle.
Who is going to pay for all of that development and maintenance? We are pirates. We don’t pay for stuff. It’s kind of our thing.
Additionally, you are proposing an option with social features and algorithms. Both are a negative because they necessarily encourage users to explicitly say what they have been downloading or uploading in a way that is being logged and therefore is evidence against them should a media company want to push for legal action.
Zlibrary nowadays also have to open different Z point for their services so I don’t think centralized is the way to go. Especially, it’s easier for the government to track everything with modern technology.
That would be amazing and even building a streaming app in too of it to compete with strraming services. Something similar to stremio for films and a music streaming service
Theres a lot of discussion here against centralization, but i wonder how possible it would be to maintain a federated infraestructure and build on top a mega meta search engine for centralization of resources
Search engine functionality goes in the sharing\communication app.
DHTs in the '90s already had search & tagging & even some rudimentary social networking, built in.
Networks like Tribler’s don’t really need a lot more features, so much as just raw usage; most people torrenting are still using the mainline DHT, which doesn’t have a search layer.
That’s largely on those users. Advanced DHT search with rich social features, already exists for those who decide to use it.
Decentralization is necessary to prevent an all eggs in one basket type of situation. An all in one would just be targeted so fast it would be worthless.
Hmmm yes. Though now that you speak of decentralization… Would be pretty epic if we had a Fediverse type platform but “posts” or in this case torrents would be saved across the network, kind of how digital currencies do. That way with enough participants worldwide, it would be quite hard to shut that platform down. Distopian still lmao
That’s actually a pretty good idea, thought It have some defect, in particular, each ActivityPub server have a limited view of the whole network. While it is usefull for avoiding abuse, it also have the downside that you can’t search for the whole thing that’s published on a platform.
But that could be solved with what is called backfilling (that Matrix does incredibly well). Sepia search (for Peertube) also does this.
Mixing ActivityPub with backfilling would be a really good idea. You can share metadata of ressources, have multiple instance, admin could block abusive website, and searching the whole site would be possible.
Maybe I’ll go study what already exist on this side.
(as an aside, Tribler does something similar to that, but only for Torrent and P2P)
+1 to just use Tribler, as it already does most of what OP mentioned:
Social features
Discovery\follow
Patronage\ratios
Sync (via following \ autodownload)
Curation\filtering\tags
Doesn’t really do privacy, but P2P over corpnets ≠ private; for “privacy”, use a proxy (or torrent exclusively things no one gets jailed for, like entertainment video\music\books).
(I know this sounds insane, but I don’t use a proxy for torrenting, yet the only ISP that ever complained was CenturyLink, when using a friend’s computer that lacked ad-blocking, to download extremely well-known torrents of a recent show, without removing the tracker URLs from the magnet link. Since 2005, zero complaints from my own torrenting, AFAIK…? I even torrent directly on my phone & cast to a TV. 🤷 I’m not recommending a no-proxy philosophy, just noting that I’ve never had an issue that required me to proxy\VPN up, even when DLing apps.)
@CoderSupreme This would sadly also be easier for any interested party to block it. i.e. ISPs could block it easier, copyright holders could have an easier time suing the platform owners and have it shut down and if the platform gets big and popular enough (like, for example, how YouTube is for videos of any sort) some content that would be hosted exclusively on that platform would likely be gone for good.
For a platform this big to survive and serve its original purpose, unhindered by DMCAs and stuff, it would be really, really hard.
Plus, the internet now is more regulated than it was 20-30 years ago when nowadays popular names like Piratebay first appeared.
And I personally don’t mind going to a few dozen websites that only a handful of people on the internet know in order to get my stuff. If any of that website gets too popular, it risks closure. Better to only have 1 website of these closed instead of all these.
ISP can’t block it easily if it’s on I2P, something akin to TOR but also kinda different. Thought going against the hoster is totally possible if not anonymous (and there actually are already piracy (torrent over I2P) website on that network)
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deleted by creator
Decentralization has always been the way for piracy, since many places inevitably go down throughout the years but it being spread out is what keeps everything from being taken down by a single closure. So while not convenient it makes it more resilient.
@CoderSupreme
Something very similar to what you describe JUST got announced a couple of weeks ago at Defcom in Vegas by Cult of the Dead Cow
well … at least the framework for it … If you want to learn more watch this (it’s a little long but it’s worth it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ
https://veilid.com/
https://cultdeadcow.com/tools/veilid.html
deleted by creator
Similarly to I2P, IPFS sites can be relatively decentralized & censorship resistant; so, that & social features, are probably why Veilid was mentioned.
They’re intrinsically more suited to private cliques than public sharing, so I agree that they don’t really replace major public forums like TPB or the old KAT.
That said, TPB’s continual relaunches are about the best a well-known centralized public site can manage, on a system as oppressive as the corporate-run “internet” we have today.
It’s a lot harder to shut down P2P apps & devices, than websites on the clearnet.
It’s planned to have communication features beyond file-transfer, but otherwise I’m not sure what similarity you’re seeing, to what the OP suggested…
i do not think a centralized effort would work for pirated content. look at all the websites that have gone down over the years.
This is a terrible idea. There’s plenty of resources out there that has links to everything you could ever want, why would it all need to be stored in one place. The piracy megathread has resources for everything you mentioned, with redundancies and multiple sources. It’s really not that hard to find anything you need. If I want a book I go to a certain site, if I want software or games I have 2 or 3 torrent sites, if I want to stream TV or movies I have dedicated sites for that. What good does putting it all in one spot do except make that a bigger target?
No. There have been many attempts at this, and just as many failures. Centralization is not the answer.
Centralizing the web is how we got into the current mess, very much no
You can kind of get that with qbitorrent and it’s search engine.
deleted by creator
A lot of folks are talking about how a centralized repository would be a big target for governments, ISPs and rights holders, but I have a different angle.
Who is going to pay for all of that development and maintenance? We are pirates. We don’t pay for stuff. It’s kind of our thing.
Additionally, you are proposing an option with social features and algorithms. Both are a negative because they necessarily encourage users to explicitly say what they have been downloading or uploading in a way that is being logged and therefore is evidence against them should a media company want to push for legal action.
Zlibrary nowadays also have to open different Z point for their services so I don’t think centralized is the way to go. Especially, it’s easier for the government to track everything with modern technology.
That would be amazing and even building a streaming app in too of it to compete with strraming services. Something similar to stremio for films and a music streaming service
Which describes torrent apps 15 years ago. I’m really not sure what people think is missing?
Theres a lot of discussion here against centralization, but i wonder how possible it would be to maintain a federated infraestructure and build on top a mega meta search engine for centralization of resources
Search engine functionality goes in the sharing\communication app.
DHTs in the '90s already had search & tagging & even some rudimentary social networking, built in.
Networks like Tribler’s don’t really need a lot more features, so much as just raw usage; most people torrenting are still using the mainline DHT, which doesn’t have a search layer.
That’s largely on those users. Advanced DHT search with rich social features, already exists for those who decide to use it.
Decentralization is necessary to prevent an all eggs in one basket type of situation. An all in one would just be targeted so fast it would be worthless.
Perhaps IPFS could work for it?
Hmmm yes. Though now that you speak of decentralization… Would be pretty epic if we had a Fediverse type platform but “posts” or in this case torrents would be saved across the network, kind of how digital currencies do. That way with enough participants worldwide, it would be quite hard to shut that platform down. Distopian still lmao
That’s actually a pretty good idea, thought It have some defect, in particular, each ActivityPub server have a limited view of the whole network. While it is usefull for avoiding abuse, it also have the downside that you can’t search for the whole thing that’s published on a platform.
But that could be solved with what is called backfilling (that Matrix does incredibly well). Sepia search (for Peertube) also does this.
Mixing ActivityPub with backfilling would be a really good idea. You can share metadata of ressources, have multiple instance, admin could block abusive website, and searching the whole site would be possible.
Maybe I’ll go study what already exist on this side.
(as an aside, Tribler does something similar to that, but only for Torrent and P2P)
+1 to just use Tribler, as it already does most of what OP mentioned:
Doesn’t really do privacy, but P2P over corpnets ≠ private; for “privacy”, use a proxy (or torrent exclusively things no one gets jailed for, like entertainment video\music\books).
(I know this sounds insane, but I don’t use a proxy for torrenting, yet the only ISP that ever complained was CenturyLink, when using a friend’s computer that lacked ad-blocking, to download extremely well-known torrents of a recent show, without removing the tracker URLs from the magnet link. Since 2005, zero complaints from my own torrenting, AFAIK…? I even torrent directly on my phone & cast to a TV. 🤷 I’m not recommending a no-proxy philosophy, just noting that I’ve never had an issue that required me to proxy\VPN up, even when DLing apps.)
It would get shutdown by multiple governments pretty quick probably
@ToxicDivinity
@CoderSupreme
won’t be if it’s distributed
True, and we have that already.
@CoderSupreme This would sadly also be easier for any interested party to block it. i.e. ISPs could block it easier, copyright holders could have an easier time suing the platform owners and have it shut down and if the platform gets big and popular enough (like, for example, how YouTube is for videos of any sort) some content that would be hosted exclusively on that platform would likely be gone for good.
For a platform this big to survive and serve its original purpose, unhindered by DMCAs and stuff, it would be really, really hard.
Plus, the internet now is more regulated than it was 20-30 years ago when nowadays popular names like Piratebay first appeared.
And I personally don’t mind going to a few dozen websites that only a handful of people on the internet know in order to get my stuff. If any of that website gets too popular, it risks closure. Better to only have 1 website of these closed instead of all these.
ISP can’t block it easily if it’s on I2P, something akin to TOR but also kinda different. Thought going against the hoster is totally possible if not anonymous (and there actually are already piracy (torrent over I2P) website on that network)