Finding public torrents for audio books is utter bullshit in my experience. Myanonamouse has a massive selection, is friendly and well organised and doesn’t have absurd rules, just reasonable ones.
I love the place.
For anything else not audio book related public trackers work just fine for me.
My experience precisely. If I can’t find it on mobilism.org, off to myanonymouse. Btw they’re amazing and the servers cost a ton, small donations make a huge difference
I’ve never been unable to find films etc that I wanted on public trackers, especially with the search function on Qbittorrent. Don’t see the need for elitist wanks on private trackers
I doubt they’d even have the obscure stuff that won’t download… Hold on…
The only one sitting at 0% is “Vacuuming Completely Nude In Paradise”, an odd British film. I doubt even a private tracker would have that
Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.
There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.
It is diverting the content from public torrents for the sole reason that no one can be bothered to make decentralised cataloguing work better than in the early 1990s in my very biased opinion.
I also mainly use public trackers id love to get some good German films and so on but they are all behind a private tracker but I learned that after I setup by *arr sadly
An anonymous network that’s better for P2P than TOR (qbittorrent supports anonymous torrents this way). Also allows hidden services like an alternative github, so they could host their code and other stuff their. That would make Nintendo’s tantrums and threats meaningless.
I was able to ask for an invite on a public forum, and I was able to use my demonoid (remember demonoid?) stats as proof back when they were semi private.
if you can show that you are a good and consistent uploader someone usually will sling an invite your way.
Making friends on sites like this can sometimes yield invites. There are also usually communities specifically dedicated to giving out invites. And if all else fails, some trackers have open invitations (either time-limited or with some kind of interview).
A common method is to get your feet wet with an easier to get into private tracker and use the invitation threads in it to get into the ones you want.
There used to be issues with tracking ratios when using a VPN. And since many private trackers require users to maintain a specific ratio, it meant that many private trackers effectively banned VPNs. Because if you were using a VPN, you’d be stuck at a 0.00 ratio and quickly get banned.
MAM used to be quite anti-VPN but I haven’t used it in years, so no idea what their take is now. They tracked quotas and stuff through your IP and required you to be online on IRC. Great content and community, but a lot of hoops to jump through.
Usually they want only your IP while signing up to be able to see if they had already banned you and you try to evade it.
Most times there was the rule that once signed up, you can turn it back on for both torrenting and browsing.
If you’re going to Torrent you need to keep one in your pocket at a minimum.
Public or private,you should be running hiding your ass through a VPN or seed box.
Private trackers run ratios to make sure that content stays available. Well you can find most of what you want on public trackers there are always a few things here and there that are much easier to find in private.
Security-wise I don’t really think there’s much of a difference. Private trackers get infiltrated and shut down they’re just much smaller when it happens so you don’t hear about as much.
I feel this way too, and the only people I’ve ever seen talk about private trackers have always had a weird chip on their shoulder. It has very “secret club” vibes. I know the stuff on public trackers only comes out because of scene leaks, but the scene wouldn’t vanish if there weren’t any more private trackers. Bittorrent was made for widespread public sharing without risk of censorship or takedowns, you don’t need to keep it hushed, it’s already protected against that. So private trackers have always just seemed like social clubs to me (I mean that in a bad way)
Yep, that and the fact that private trackers have buy-in or subscription fees and mandatory upload ratios.
I value the anonymity of a public tracker that doesn’t tie me down with any means of fund transfer or prolonged upload through which I could be exposed if my VPN dropped or the payment channel got compromised, crypto or not.
I would and for the most part have used private trackers for either a specific type of thing or a specific kinda obscure or not very popular title. I find that the more not well known a thing is, the more likely it’s going to be found and (re)seeded on a private tracker.
Exactly my experience. I’m in a private tracker for books and audiobooks that sometimes has content that’s not on other sites (audiobooks, in particular).
I also just joined a different private tracker that specializes in pre-organized .img files pre-loaded for emulation setups. Like, a one-file 1TB image ready to roll with everything preconfigured.
For popular TV/film, private trackers are unnecessary, unless maybe you’re very particular about 4K/8K REMUX quality or something more specific.
Just shamelessly begging, I haven’t been on a private tracker in over a decade but I should probably step up my game again with the way that streaming services are headed.
My previous experience was that I was completely incapable of maintaining a decent seed ratio on my home connection. I felt that many users were using seedboxes with really high upload speeds and hogging all the seeding. But I still felt it was quite a valuable community because, as people have already mentioned, the organization and quality of the torrents is infinitely better. So I basically used it sparingly for stuff that was hard to find. They also had a bunch of free-leech torrents that didn’t affect your ratio, which was a really nice feature. Honestly can’t remember the name of the site though.
Same, also looking for private tracker invites, ideally where you’re rewarded for both seed ratio and time kept alive.
I just built a 24 TB NAS (expandable to 432 TB over time) with arrr services. I also tend to take existing content and add complete metadata for higher quality files (mostly FLAC audio files).
/r/opensignups (sadly the lemmy version seems abandoned at the moment).
Monitor that daily if you can. Torrent leech in particular should be opening their doors soon for open registration (they usually do in spring, if not it won’t be long as they do so twice a year anyways). TL is a great starter and honestly many people will never need more. Very easy to maintain on with great free leech on anything over a certain size which ends up meaning all remuxes and most TV show seasons.
/r/opensignups (sadly the lemmy version seems abandoned at the moment).
Monitor that daily if you can. Torrent leech in particular should be opening their doors soon for open registration (they usually do in spring, if not it won’t be long as they do so twice a year anyways). TL is a great starter and honestly many people will never need more. Very easy to maintain on with great free leech on anything over a certain size which ends up meaning all remuxes and most TV show seasons.
Some of them are designed for having people buying upload credits. I’m into one where only the admins are allowed to post new torrents, and they keep everything on 5 seedboxes. It’s almost impossible to seed back, as their own seedboxes are pushing too much upload, then old torrents are removed and re-uploaded “to gather interest”, but that means you will never find new peers. And then they always send messages complaining that they’re spending 500 a month for those seedboxes “to guarantee fast downloads” and everyone should become a donator or the site will close. Assholes, those seedboxes are indeed guaranteeing fast downloads, but also are guaranteeing zero upload back
I’m not really a fan because in a lot of cases it forces you to download stuff you might not want just to establish and maintain an acceptable ratio so eventually you can get the stuff you do want.
if I wanted something obscure and not really interested in the popular thing I’m either wasting bandwidth and/or server space starting out or searching for that thing on a public tracker.
the one private tracker I do use is extremely generous with upload credits for newbies and I was able to take advantage of that plus contribute something right away so I didn’t and still don’t have any issues but I know that’s not the case with some people.
Being open to all and then shut down by police after 6 months doesn’t help piracy either. The upside to closed trackers is that stuff can be archived for years.
Until it gets nuked by pigs stealing everything.
A decentralised pirate catalogue based on Musicbrainz is something I want to see before I die. People diverted their efforts into vulnerable private trackers instead.
This is how I feel about people on soulseek who lock files, even more so the cunts that want things like bandcamp vouchers in return for accessing something they have. Cunts.
Better quality releases and more active users with much less leeches as they get thrown out.
Though there are many site admins with some complex here too… your experience can vary.
And of course you need to contribute to the community, most trackers will grant you buffer for both uploading and keeping the torrent running. You want something, then you have to give back.
If the tracker doesnt give possebilities to build your buffer in multiple ways, other than just uploading, its usually a shit tracker.
And some are just super hard to impossible to get into. Start small, wait for open signups or just go to new trackers, they might get bigger over time.
Dont publicly beg for invites, you can humiliate yourself in private chats if you are into that.
I think it depends on why you pirate. Are you doing it because you don’t want to pay? Then services like usenet and private trackers, where there is some expectation of payment (be it monetary or bandwidth) are probably not for you.
Do you pirate because you hate DRM and want to self host a robust media library that you can curate without fear of media being removed because of an expired license or something? Then you might be more into private trackers and Usenet. I spend almost as much on hard drives and Usenet subscriptions and PT donations as a Netflix account.
They’re extremely good for higher quality content such as 4K REMUX files. I have access to a private tracker that I use regularly. I only search public trackers if what I want isn’t available in the private one…which is rare.
To me it’s not about price or openness or anything. Piracy is a service issue. Private trackers have better service than public trackers. Better curated content, better seeders, and fewer (if any) shit quality re-encodes by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Finding public torrents for audio books is utter bullshit in my experience. Myanonamouse has a massive selection, is friendly and well organised and doesn’t have absurd rules, just reasonable ones.
I love the place.
For anything else not audio book related public trackers work just fine for me.
I really want to join them, but “sign up with your actual IP” is an unconditional dealbreaker as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t consider a VPN optional for regular web browsing. I’m definitely not turning it off for something that’s actually Illegal.
My experience precisely. If I can’t find it on mobilism.org, off to myanonymouse. Btw they’re amazing and the servers cost a ton, small donations make a huge difference
I’ve never been unable to find films etc that I wanted on public trackers, especially with the search function on Qbittorrent. Don’t see the need for elitist wanks on private trackers
I doubt they’d even have the obscure stuff that won’t download… Hold on…
The only one sitting at 0% is “Vacuuming Completely Nude In Paradise”, an odd British film. I doubt even a private tracker would have that
Replying to say that I will check mine tomorrow. Too late tonight.
Edit: Mine did not have this film. :(
Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.
There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.
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Yay, one film in the last two years that I could’ve obtained if I had a private tracker instead of public ones
Think I’ll survive, thanks! 😁
I agree. It’s one of my favourite websites. Not just for the torrents but the community is really great too. The book clubs are super neat too!
It is diverting the content from public torrents for the sole reason that no one can be bothered to make decentralised cataloguing work better than in the early 1990s in my very biased opinion.
I also mainly use public trackers id love to get some good German films and so on but they are all behind a private tracker but I learned that after I setup by *arr sadly
We talking German films or German films?
The language German 😅 If you have any clue where and how I could get them without a private tracker you would make my day
Not a clue, sorry. I use Kodi and real debrid for movies/shows. I was just trying to make a scat joke.
Without private trackers the best way to get German content would probably be through Usenet. Scenenzbs.com would probably be the best indexer there.
Getting into some of the larger German private Torrent trackers isn’t that hard though.
Not for me.
Just use I2P 🤷 It’s slow, but it’s safe
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
What’s that?
https://geti2p.net
An anonymous network that’s better for P2P than TOR (qbittorrent supports anonymous torrents this way). Also allows hidden services like an alternative github, so they could host their code and other stuff their. That would make Nintendo’s tantrums and threats meaningless.
As somebody else posted https://geti2p.net
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
How do you get membership to a private tracker when they are always invite only?
I was able to ask for an invite on a public forum, and I was able to use my demonoid (remember demonoid?) stats as proof back when they were semi private.
if you can show that you are a good and consistent uploader someone usually will sling an invite your way.
there are trackers which has interviews for invites. from there you can start using, gain ranks and get invited to other trackers.
A lot of them have interviews in their IRC channel. That’s how I got into MAM.
Making friends on sites like this can sometimes yield invites. There are also usually communities specifically dedicated to giving out invites. And if all else fails, some trackers have open invitations (either time-limited or with some kind of interview).
A common method is to get your feet wet with an easier to get into private tracker and use the invitation threads in it to get into the ones you want.
And how do you make friends on these sites?
Switch to Arch, obv.
I use arch (btw). Please give invite
Some sometimes open up for a time.
It’s all I use. I feel like there’s less risk and they’re way more organized.
If you are forced to disable your vpn there is more risk. I’m not sure if some permit a vpn but I wouldn’t be trusting any of them without one.
Even with VPN, ultimately you’re still storing everything at your house. Seedbox, preferably in the Netherlands is the way to go.
I use a VPN and it’s on a kill switch, so if it gets disconnected for whatever reason, the machine can’t reach the internet at all.
I can’t imagine why a private tracker would disallow you from using a VPN
There used to be issues with tracking ratios when using a VPN. And since many private trackers require users to maintain a specific ratio, it meant that many private trackers effectively banned VPNs. Because if you were using a VPN, you’d be stuck at a 0.00 ratio and quickly get banned.
I use a VPN and maintain a ratio. They must use something other than IP address as a unique identifier.
MAM used to be quite anti-VPN but I haven’t used it in years, so no idea what their take is now. They tracked quotas and stuff through your IP and required you to be online on IRC. Great content and community, but a lot of hoops to jump through.
Usually they want only your IP while signing up to be able to see if they had already banned you and you try to evade it.
Most times there was the rule that once signed up, you can turn it back on for both torrenting and browsing.
Same. Plus the quality encodes are a lot easier to find and more abundant (assuming you care about such things of course)
The organization and typical submission requirements are what really put them over public trackers for me.
Public tracker: It’s this big and this many files. Figure it out.*
Private tracker: All the metadata
* Experience may vary. Post is overly dramatic for comedic effect
If you’re going to Torrent you need to keep one in your pocket at a minimum.
Public or private,you should be running hiding your ass through a VPN or seed box.
Private trackers run ratios to make sure that content stays available. Well you can find most of what you want on public trackers there are always a few things here and there that are much easier to find in private.
Security-wise I don’t really think there’s much of a difference. Private trackers get infiltrated and shut down they’re just much smaller when it happens so you don’t hear about as much.
I always wonder how IPtorrents is still running. It’s a bit bigger and has a less than savory reputation, so I figure it would draw more attention.
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So far there’s never been a thing I couldn’t find on a public tracker, so there was never a need to look into it.
I feel this way too, and the only people I’ve ever seen talk about private trackers have always had a weird chip on their shoulder. It has very “secret club” vibes. I know the stuff on public trackers only comes out because of scene leaks, but the scene wouldn’t vanish if there weren’t any more private trackers. Bittorrent was made for widespread public sharing without risk of censorship or takedowns, you don’t need to keep it hushed, it’s already protected against that. So private trackers have always just seemed like social clubs to me (I mean that in a bad way)
Yep, that and the fact that private trackers have buy-in or subscription fees and mandatory upload ratios.
I value the anonymity of a public tracker that doesn’t tie me down with any means of fund transfer or prolonged upload through which I could be exposed if my VPN dropped or the payment channel got compromised, crypto or not.
The ones that cost money aren’t worth using.
I would and for the most part have used private trackers for either a specific type of thing or a specific kinda obscure or not very popular title. I find that the more not well known a thing is, the more likely it’s going to be found and (re)seeded on a private tracker.
Exactly my experience. I’m in a private tracker for books and audiobooks that sometimes has content that’s not on other sites (audiobooks, in particular).
I also just joined a different private tracker that specializes in pre-organized .img files pre-loaded for emulation setups. Like, a one-file 1TB image ready to roll with everything preconfigured.
For popular TV/film, private trackers are unnecessary, unless maybe you’re very particular about 4K/8K REMUX quality or something more specific.
If anyone has invites to a decent tracker, hmu.
Just shamelessly begging, I haven’t been on a private tracker in over a decade but I should probably step up my game again with the way that streaming services are headed.
My previous experience was that I was completely incapable of maintaining a decent seed ratio on my home connection. I felt that many users were using seedboxes with really high upload speeds and hogging all the seeding. But I still felt it was quite a valuable community because, as people have already mentioned, the organization and quality of the torrents is infinitely better. So I basically used it sparingly for stuff that was hard to find. They also had a bunch of free-leech torrents that didn’t affect your ratio, which was a really nice feature. Honestly can’t remember the name of the site though.
Same, also looking for private tracker invites, ideally where you’re rewarded for both seed ratio and time kept alive.
I just built a 24 TB NAS (expandable to 432 TB over time) with arrr services. I also tend to take existing content and add complete metadata for higher quality files (mostly FLAC audio files).
/r/opensignups (sadly the lemmy version seems abandoned at the moment).
Monitor that daily if you can. Torrent leech in particular should be opening their doors soon for open registration (they usually do in spring, if not it won’t be long as they do so twice a year anyways). TL is a great starter and honestly many people will never need more. Very easy to maintain on with great free leech on anything over a certain size which ends up meaning all remuxes and most TV show seasons.
/r/opensignups (sadly the lemmy version seems abandoned at the moment).
Monitor that daily if you can. Torrent leech in particular should be opening their doors soon for open registration (they usually do in spring, if not it won’t be long as they do so twice a year anyways). TL is a great starter and honestly many people will never need more. Very easy to maintain on with great free leech on anything over a certain size which ends up meaning all remuxes and most TV show seasons.
Thanks for the lead 👍
Some of them are designed for having people buying upload credits. I’m into one where only the admins are allowed to post new torrents, and they keep everything on 5 seedboxes. It’s almost impossible to seed back, as their own seedboxes are pushing too much upload, then old torrents are removed and re-uploaded “to gather interest”, but that means you will never find new peers. And then they always send messages complaining that they’re spending 500 a month for those seedboxes “to guarantee fast downloads” and everyone should become a donator or the site will close. Assholes, those seedboxes are indeed guaranteeing fast downloads, but also are guaranteeing zero upload back
I’m not really a fan because in a lot of cases it forces you to download stuff you might not want just to establish and maintain an acceptable ratio so eventually you can get the stuff you do want.
if I wanted something obscure and not really interested in the popular thing I’m either wasting bandwidth and/or server space starting out or searching for that thing on a public tracker.
the one private tracker I do use is extremely generous with upload credits for newbies and I was able to take advantage of that plus contribute something right away so I didn’t and still don’t have any issues but I know that’s not the case with some people.
Childish and against the spirit of piracy. Always have been.
Being open to all and then shut down by police after 6 months doesn’t help piracy either. The upside to closed trackers is that stuff can be archived for years.
Until it gets nuked by pigs stealing everything. A decentralised pirate catalogue based on Musicbrainz is something I want to see before I die. People diverted their efforts into vulnerable private trackers instead.
I guess you never heard of what.cd
I have. It was a cult.
Single point of failure also. What.CD was the best vaccine against them: those naive idealists had hosting in France…
Public trackers are shit because of freeloaders and Stremio. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Stremio is bad?
it doesn’t seed the torrent back, only leeches
Edit: an alternative to stremio is using sequential download in qbit. that way, you can seed too
This is how I feel about people on soulseek who lock files, even more so the cunts that want things like bandcamp vouchers in return for accessing something they have. Cunts.
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Better quality releases and more active users with much less leeches as they get thrown out.
Though there are many site admins with some complex here too… your experience can vary.
And of course you need to contribute to the community, most trackers will grant you buffer for both uploading and keeping the torrent running. You want something, then you have to give back.
If the tracker doesnt give possebilities to build your buffer in multiple ways, other than just uploading, its usually a shit tracker.
And some are just super hard to impossible to get into. Start small, wait for open signups or just go to new trackers, they might get bigger over time.
Dont publicly beg for invites, you can humiliate yourself in private chats if you are into that.
I think it depends on why you pirate. Are you doing it because you don’t want to pay? Then services like usenet and private trackers, where there is some expectation of payment (be it monetary or bandwidth) are probably not for you.
Do you pirate because you hate DRM and want to self host a robust media library that you can curate without fear of media being removed because of an expired license or something? Then you might be more into private trackers and Usenet. I spend almost as much on hard drives and Usenet subscriptions and PT donations as a Netflix account.
Or if you want films or série in a specific languages with decent quality and not too big file size
They’re extremely good for higher quality content such as 4K REMUX files. I have access to a private tracker that I use regularly. I only search public trackers if what I want isn’t available in the private one…which is rare.
To me it’s not about price or openness or anything. Piracy is a service issue. Private trackers have better service than public trackers. Better curated content, better seeders, and fewer (if any) shit quality re-encodes by people who don’t know what they’re doing.