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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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[-] UiUiUiUiUi@piefed.nl 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Cool what client would you recommend?

It’s a bit suspicious to recommend two protocols as I question if you use it yourself or just looked it up.

[-] MEtrINeS@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

well gnutella is almost dead, the only usable client is gtk-gnutella https://sourceforge.net/projects/gtk-gnutella/, but there's not enough users. You might be lucky if you find anything you want.

For ed2k, you have amule https://github.com/amule-org/amule/releases/tag/3.1.0 . This network still has around 100k users (a drop in the number of torrent total users - but it's around the same number of users of soulseek) but you can still find lots of stuff there. Lately the amule client has been improving and improving and currently it's the best client for ed2k - my opinion.

For you to have high id you need to have 2 ports open, and some vpn don't allow that. They only allow one port. With ed2k you can search the network (imagine like searching directly the bittorrent DHT), or you can use any ed2k link sharing community to get the stuff you want - this way is safer

It’s a bit suspicious to recommend two protocols as I question if you use it yourself or just looked it up.

Well, i'm old enough to have used almost everything. And i like to know how stuff works.

[-] UiUiUiUiUi@piefed.nl 2 points 3 days ago

I tried amule and it is technically better than soulseek but the client is not as friendly.

This one particularly is pretty sketchy where bold and colour define if it is shared or not. I’m currently not certain if I’m sharing my root dir recursively or not, I’ll come back once they’ve improved it.

https://github.com/amule-org/amule/issues/1519

[-] MEtrINeS@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago

Awesome that you opened a github ticket. Most people just complain on forums/reddit/lemmy.

And yes i agree with you, there are some stuff that can be more user friendly and less confusing.

[-] UiUiUiUiUi@piefed.nl 2 points 2 days ago

I didn’t make that issue sorry, but hey you aren’t using Gnutella so even? xD

[-] supervent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

For ed2k/kad I am using rucio is written in rust. Also aMule was updated recently.

this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026

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