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

submitted 6 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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[-] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Using lemmy as example, when i request posts from another server, my server will request only those posts. It won't request everything. Do you see the difference?

That's just how activitypub works because the alternative would be too costly. But you could design a federation system that replicates everything.

A precise description is:
Usenet is a distributed system where servers peer with each other to replicate articles (P2P at the server layer), while users interact in a client–server manner with their chosen news provider.

Even your perplexity output admits that it's not fully P2P like bittorrent. And if we count "partial P2P", then activitypub would also count since even selective replication, is some amount of replication, and tbus "partial P2P"

[-] MEtrINeS@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 day ago

Even your perplexity output admits that it’s not fully P2P like bittorrent. And if we count “partial P2P”, then activitypub would also count since even selective replication, is some amount of replication, and tbus “partial P2P”

I wrote p2p at server level. Ofcourse it is not 100% p2p, if it was full p2p then it would be just p2p. usenet is p2p at server level, and you have the references above to prove it (you don't need to trust me).

this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026

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