7 ms·

That's true, but TBP has been going pretty strong for over 2 decades. It can be hard to totally shut something down, if people want it.

noduerme 12d ago
Sadly, the music selection has fallen off a cliff, and the rest is in a sharply downward spiral... in one sense this is because the music industry finally settled on a streaming model that most people are willing to rent, and it's also because the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.
- tosti 12d ago
  It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.
- tancop 12d ago
  It's also because torrents are a bad fit for music. The whole protocol is designed for throughput and reliability on big downloads like movies and games, not fast start on 2MB files you don't need to split with today's broadband. A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually. The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware. If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.
- conradfr 12d ago
  Soulseek is working fine. But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
  - apefulsin 12d ago
    Soulseek is centralised, and censors searches in compliance with legal requests. If you connect to someone who has censored content, the central server can't stop you grabbing it, but you have to find them another way.
  - noduerme 11d ago
    Soulseek is great and reminiscent of the old BBS days. But it feels a lot more fragile than torrenting. 15 years ago, TPB was still a place you could get hard-to-find music. Now you are lucky to find a single person on soulseek with an album you're looking for.
- petcat 12d ago
  > the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files. It has very little to do with this and more just about the ubiquitous availability of 5G and always-available streaming. I stopped caring about data hoarding once I could just access anything I wanted reliably wherever I was.
  - hedora 12d ago
    Streaming is getting worse fast. I basically just pay for curation, and AI slop is creating cracks in that model. Some of the musicians I like are getting crushed by sybil style attacks, where there are 10 new albums in their artist page, but only one is theirs. Fortunately, sending a screenshot to Claude tells me what to push in a minute or so, but, unfortunately, I can’t just hand it an API endpoint and have it scrub all this crap weekly. (No idea why the streaming service can’t just do that themselves, of course…) Of course, for movies, it’s gotten to the point where I just drive to the used DVD store. $1-5 per movie used (including blurays); $20-30 new. I usually walk out with a dozen or so films for $100. This is easier than tpb.
    - jamwil 12d ago
      I am not sure what streaming service you are using but it sounds awful. I have not encountered anything like what you describe on Apple Music.
      - apefulsin 12d ago
        Probably Spotify
  - noduerme 11d ago
    no, the ubiquity of 5G is what allowed you to be brainwashed into not storing your own files and using cloud storage or streaming for everything. It's kind of like water, food or electricity. You probably don't own a generator, don't keep lots of water or food stores in case things go down for awhile. You assume things will always work. Storage is dirt cheap insurance. 5G is a luxury that can go away at any moment, and doesn't exist on large parts of the planet. Even if it does, they can just remove something you "own" from your library.
deleted 12d ago
[deleted]

noduerme 12d ago

Sadly, the music selection has fallen off a cliff, and the rest is in a sharply downward spiral... in one sense this is because the music industry finally settled on a streaming model that most people are willing to rent, and it's also because the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.

tosti 12d ago
It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.
tancop 12d ago
It's also because torrents are a bad fit for music. The whole protocol is designed for throughput and reliability on big downloads like movies and games, not fast start on 2MB files you don't need to split with today's broadband. A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually. The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware. If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.
conradfr 12d ago
Soulseek is working fine. But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
- apefulsin 12d ago
  Soulseek is centralised, and censors searches in compliance with legal requests. If you connect to someone who has censored content, the central server can't stop you grabbing it, but you have to find them another way.
- noduerme 11d ago
  Soulseek is great and reminiscent of the old BBS days. But it feels a lot more fragile than torrenting. 15 years ago, TPB was still a place you could get hard-to-find music. Now you are lucky to find a single person on soulseek with an album you're looking for.
petcat 12d ago
> the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files. It has very little to do with this and more just about the ubiquitous availability of 5G and always-available streaming. I stopped caring about data hoarding once I could just access anything I wanted reliably wherever I was.
- hedora 12d ago
  Streaming is getting worse fast. I basically just pay for curation, and AI slop is creating cracks in that model. Some of the musicians I like are getting crushed by sybil style attacks, where there are 10 new albums in their artist page, but only one is theirs. Fortunately, sending a screenshot to Claude tells me what to push in a minute or so, but, unfortunately, I can’t just hand it an API endpoint and have it scrub all this crap weekly. (No idea why the streaming service can’t just do that themselves, of course…) Of course, for movies, it’s gotten to the point where I just drive to the used DVD store. $1-5 per movie used (including blurays); $20-30 new. I usually walk out with a dozen or so films for $100. This is easier than tpb.
  - jamwil 12d ago
    I am not sure what streaming service you are using but it sounds awful. I have not encountered anything like what you describe on Apple Music.
    - apefulsin 12d ago
      Probably Spotify
- noduerme 11d ago
  no, the ubiquity of 5G is what allowed you to be brainwashed into not storing your own files and using cloud storage or streaming for everything. It's kind of like water, food or electricity. You probably don't own a generator, don't keep lots of water or food stores in case things go down for awhile. You assume things will always work. Storage is dirt cheap insurance. 5G is a luxury that can go away at any moment, and doesn't exist on large parts of the planet. Even if it does, they can just remove something you "own" from your library.

deleted 12d ago

[deleted]