Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West.

Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct.

I have a p2p sharing websites bookmarks which I collected about 5 years ago, 60% of them are dead now.

Private (invite-only) West sharing websites are still alive though, but are supported mostly by beefy enthusiasts who seed everything via a seedbox elsewhere, not in their home country on their residential connection.

Rutracker went the other way: they organized donation collection to buy the HDDs to the 'saviours' group, a one-time investment compared to the datacenter server cost. In RU/UA, people usually seed from home.

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omgmajk an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I haven't used a public site since Suprnova so I don't know about the health of public p2p sites at all. The private side is absolutely not stagnant, new sites pop up all the time and you can still find all the niche stuff you want to find by just nudging the enthusiasts with requests.

A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.

	▲	ValdikSS 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, that's true, but the core reason there are private p2p sites is because you're most likely to get a DMCA violation letter from the watchdog company via your ISP or to you directly in the West. Even if it may be not a punishable offense, that still freaks out people, and they choose not to seed from home or use public websites which are scraped by DMCA watchdogs. I don't see much point in contributing to closed silos (even if I'm present on the majority of invite-only music trackers and occasionally contribute there) because I have ThePirateBay and RuTracker account: it's the same, but it's open for everyone and google-able. Some private trackers disallow accessing them via VPN, which I find super strange. They want to access the website with your residential connection, but they allow seeding via VPN (which many do, because see above). Other private tracker which I used to be on had a timeout on account life time. If you don't log in once in a while (6 months AFAIR), your account will be suspended, even if you're seeding all the content in the torrent client all this time.

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greenavocado an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed, Russia and Ukraine are the last major digital libraries of the history and culture of modern western civilization, which is deeply disturbing to write out in text, and says a lot about how far the west has fallen