I never said that and you're wildly missing my point. If the person running your site hasn't run things in a way that they can tank some news coverage, it was doomed from the start.

Take this very lemmy instance. The public facing load balancer they currently use is hosted in France. They aren't revealing anything beyond that and anythung further isn't something that can be reasonably found by anyone not involved with the systems administration side of things for the instance. The admins are careful to practice proper opsec as well, not revealing their home country.

You can find all sorts of writeups about countless less than legal sites and projects, both ones that survived and ones that died. Not a single dead one is dead because of attention. Most are dead because the people running it made some mistake that allowed authorities to find their real identity so they could be prosecuted. Or because of internal drama. Or rising costs, like myrient which is closing the end of this month.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

The last time I even remember private trackers being taken down was in the days of Oink.UK and What.CD.

Oink was shut down in 2007 and What was shut down in 2016, both mostly because they had grown so big they were hard to ignore. A lot of modern sites keep an upper limit on the accounts they allow to prevent too much growth and attracting attention.

Hell, I remember baconBits having an upper limit of less than 10,000 accounts. Once that limit was reached, you couldn't even send out invites.