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For some reason people use torrents over usenet.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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For some reason people like to pay to pirate, go figure...
I like boobies and Usenet 😁
Longevity, trying to find something from 15 years ago is pain
To be fair, that's an issue for both torrent and usenet. If it's popular enough, you will still find seeder or reupload 15 years later but if it's not, you may be out of luck either way
What, you never downloaded a game divided in 40 100MB chunks off of MegaUpload before only to find out part 27 is broken🫠
What, you’ve never downloaded a game divided into 5 1.2MB chunks via a 1200 baud dialup modem using XModem on a WWIV BBS?
Fucking war flashbacks happening now
When gen Z asks about this the only response we can give is "you don't know man, you werent there".
oh luelinks, you are missed
This is a little different from torrent. This is torment.
Since xitter is only for whiny right wing little bitches and moderation is mostly gone and only applies to political content ego-baby doesn't like, so I guess this flies under the radar, maybe?
Yeah, thought the same, another sign of Shitter becoming 4chan.
Thats a good sign actually.
People have been sharing things in storage drives for decades. Fmhy has a list of some big ones, usually for books.
Traditionally i believe these were not advertised and more underground, a way to easily share with friends.
You didn’t really want them easily found and traceable to you though but that is what changed.
Piracy has become so normalised that people take it for granted that there are no legal risks involved. Normalising piracy is the first step for the ideals of software freedom to flourish.
After all what is a digital file if not a bunch of writing that instructs the computer to draw pixels on your screen. You wouldn’t copyright the words to ask a human to make a drawing about a copyrighted something, so why do it for a computer?
After all what is a digital file if not a bunch of writing that instructs the computer to draw pixels on your screen.
A digital file is just a number, potentially a very big number, but that's all it is.
To be fair, that's also like, all information
Funny thing is, if the instructions are written down I'm pretty sure they are copyrightable
Thats what copyleft licensing is for and why physical things are increasingly using gpl and other open software licenses.
Any pirate born after 2000 can't torrent. All they know is...
Be gay, Reddit [REQUEST] and JuegosGratis.com
This has been a thing for years although it used to be sketchy blogs (and probably still is tbf in addition to this). Back in the days of rapid share, mega before Kim dotcom got busted, etc. some people just can’t figure out torrents or they live in a situation where torrents can’t be used (isp shaping, internet controlled by a 3rd party that blocks torrenting, etc) and usually http downloads are fine in those situations.
If you ever have to rely on this get jdownloader at least
Wait, I thought Mega was relatively safe? What happened with Kim dotcom?
Mega used to be called MegaUpload and it was just plain ol’ cloud storage. US media companies coordinated with the NZ government and apprehended Kim Dotcom in NZ and shut down MegaUpload. Dotcom had money and lots of lawyers, so he’s staved off being entirely destroyed and formed Mega, which is E2EE and so he cannot accept any liability because they cannot know what is being stored.
Check out this wild ass video from 2012: https://youtu.be/o0Wvn-9BXVc
try searching megaupload
How ...inefficient
Nothing inefficient about adding another avenue for pirating Decentralization makes us stronger
Let the babies have their fun. This is like their Kazaa
I concur
It's less resilient, honestly with today speeds it is not that less efficient I would say.
More efficient if the file is less popular or super niche with few seeders with tiny upload speeds or no seeds (due to age of the torrent or the before mentioned). Torrents for sure are more resilient as far as being harder to just shutdown a site. It is still nice to constantly have all options possible to make getting files easy. Though I will say that torrents are more efficient the larger the file. 4k media being a very good example.
Back in the day, I'd prefer hosted links over torrents. Felt safer and was less hassle.
I'm sure I remember that movies were found in dropbox around 2010s as well - it's sketchy but it exists 🤷 not scary torrent but supersafe download
If you live in a country that makes telecoms monitor traffic then those have a benefit of not requiring a VPN (because you’re not uploading anything and they usually go for those seeding).
it isn't illegal to download, only upload. Torrents get you in trouble because of seeding, not downloading
It depends on your local laws I think. I'm pretty sure downloading free copyrighted product from an unauthorized source is still illegal in France for exemple.
How are you, the naive seeker, supposed to know if something is authorised or not?
By fucking obviousness.
At least that's what a court would rule, likely with more formal terminology.
Reminds me of the undergrad experience of someone who is not me, lol. They had "the dropbox", spoken about only in hushed tones and never openly acknowledged, which may have contained a pdf copy of every single text required by the curriculum of that person's major.
Yeah for reasons beyond my knowing torrenting seems to have really dropped off over recent years.
They are much much more likely to use phones/tablets/maybe even Chromebooks. Torrenting is much easier with a PC. Torrent apps for the others do exist, but do require understanding how to use them (and not use them if on cell data without actual unlimited plans). They are used to just streaming things and not really care about keeping the actual files. So even being patient enough to wait for a file to download is at least a good thing I guess.
Kids (zoomies and younger) aren't that savvy with computers
I think it's in part because of NAT. Less and less people have a real IP address, so they can't share the torrents to others, and most VPNs don't provide an upload port either.
The tracker websites are also increasingly hostile with malicious ads, so those with ineffective ad blockers can't use them.
Qbittorrent works with my double-nat set up (don't ask why, my isp sucks) without any set up. I feel like it's more of a tech literacy issue.
Torrent clients can cope behind NAT but can only upload/download from other peers that have a port open so they are more limited in the pool of peers they can make use of.
Good public trackers were shut down. Getting into decent private ones is a huge pain, if you even manage to get an invitation/interview. Some trackers aren't compatible with *Arrs (due to Cloudflare). Seeders and speeds can be awful, and keeping a healthy ration isn't easy for some. If one is willing to pay, Usenet is a great alternative. I run both to cover most ground, but mostly rely on the latter now.
All you all know there are entire sites dedicated to cloud storage sharing right? We also have OD's and OGD's. Link shared GD's. None of this is new, it's been this way since you could drag anything down off a BBS or mainframe. We have been sharing in every manner you can think of since it's been possible, digital just made it dummy easy.
I feel like a torrent is safer because uploading a file to a cloud storage can be done by anyone, meanwhile creating a torrent and a botnet to simulate an active torrent takes much more time and effort
Do not forget .scr and .ink files. They are probavly deadly.
Then again, people with nefarious purposes are usually highly motivated.
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