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.
SoulSeek? Its like old limewire; dangerous and also full of really kind people too.
Nicotine+ is a client.
I think a combination of Soulseek and bittorrent, so you can share your library in the file structure you want, then collectively seed files with the same hash.
is it like emule ?
So… … … emule and gnutella? Both have DHT and that’s how they work…
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.
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
Well, i’m old enough to have used almost everything. And i like to know how stuff works.
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
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.
I didn’t make that issue sorry, but hey you aren’t using Gnutella so even? xD
For ed2k/kad I am using rucio is written in rust. Also aMule was updated recently.
I haven’t tried SoulSeek. What does it do better than Bittorrent?
EDIT: After playing around with SoulSeek, it seems pretty cool, although the amount of time it takes to scan your files on startup is laughably bad.
Soukseek is great, I recently discovered people sharing also movies and other stuff, so not only music which is what is famous for. You can also ban Israel from your sharing!
It’s like Napster or Limewire if you ever used them. You download files directly from individual users. You can also browse all of a user’s shared files.
It requires inbound connectivity to work well, so you’ll have to ensure your VPN supports port forwarding. The VPN that’s usually recommended for Soulseek (and torrenting) is AirVPN.
Do people not recommend PIA anymore? I’ve used it for a long time and never had issues. Supports port forwarding. Audits have shown they don’t store activity logs, and they even run RAM-only servers.
EDIT: Just looked at AirVPN. It’s nice they don’t request any identifying info on signup.
In older versions of Soulseek, you had to have two consecutive port numbers (eg. 20000 and 20001, or 12345 and 12346, etc). AirVPN was the only VPN that let you pick the port numbers, so you could guarantee getting two consecutive ports.
I don’t think modern Soulseek clients require that any more (slskd only requires one port as far as I can tell) so it’s not important any more, but AirVPN is still the most recommended by Soulseek users.
Private Internet Access only give you a single forwarded port, so you couldn’t use it for both torrents and Soulseek at the same time (for example). AirVPN used to provide 20, but I think they reduced it to 5 for new accounts.
AirVPN’s forwarded ports are also not server-specific; you get your chosen ports regardless of which server you use.
PIA is owned by Israel. https://hackread.com/private-internet-access-pia-vpn-sold-israel-privacy-concerns/
Well fuck me. I mean I don’t think that’s an immediate issue for me but that does suck.
EDIT: Although if we’re being honest, has PIA been found doing anything shady in the 7 years since they were acquired?
Being owned by Israel is the shady thing, I assume anything owned by Israel to be compromised and to have a backdoor. Same as I would any technology owned by the 4 eyes.
It’s more like (old) Facebook where you make your media folder available to download, add buddies so you can check out their library later, thank them using the in built chat.
Just use a vpn with a port. And don’t add identifiable stuff to share.
Wait since when have you had to use a VPN with soulseek? I’ve never done that and I live in the states.
You don’t need to. But it’s probably a good idea for the same reason as with BitTorrent.
Really great explanation. I’ve always thought about giving it a go but haven’t tried yet.