alt Hacker NewsPublic 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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Isn't this largely because bandwidths got fast enough to not need P2P for music any more? You can use SLSK which is DirectConnect-style, or direct downloads, or Spotify/YouTube downloaders.
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.
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
> Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West.
Orpheus and RED are going extremely strong right now, with very active userbases
Anime (an everything related) torrent sites are also pretty alive.
> Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct.
But rutracker is still going very strong, and shows up in every magnet link scraper.
> 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.
I don't think this is true at all. I think most are seeded through simple residential connections. The main reasons people use seedboxes are because everybody has a laptop that travels with them and isn't powered up and networked all the time (rather than a desktop that is never turned off), or because they don't want to hear from their ISP. It's not because of "beefiness." The amount of data it takes to store or transfer an album is trivial.
I just think that a lot of people with very mainstream tastes drifted away from p2p as they realized that spotify etc. satisfied all their needs. The people left on private p2p are largely the people who trading things that aren't available on streaming, or who just don't like the streaming experience at all.
Fun fact: Rutracker is one of the few remaining places on the internet where random Russians and Ukrainians talk respectfully to each other, and do so in Russian.