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What do you think is the future of file sharing? (programming.dev)

submitted 5 days ago by tatterdemalion@programming.dev to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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.

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[-] mp3@lemmy.ca 19 points 5 days ago

BitTorrent is a good middle ground between decentralization, adoption and user-friendliness. I think the transport layer is pretty solid, and there's no need to stick an anonymity layer at the protocol level, as the preferred method might change over time.

Combined with a VPN to handle the anonymity part, I think it's solid and modular enough.

[-] tatterdemalion@programming.dev 8 points 5 days ago

I agree the transport layer is good and having anonymity in a different layer works. I think my main gripes with it today are:

Anonymity is paid for and trust-based. It'd be awesome if something like I2P started working well enough that anyone could have anonymity for free without needing to trust a company or worry about poor performance.
Private trackers. While I understand the logic behind this form of community (incentivize seeding and make bans meaningful), I think it's possible to solve those problems with a public tracker. I have ideas on how this could work if anyone is interested.

this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026

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