Just cracks me up when normies think that any of these things actually has access to “basically anything”. Not everything is even on the internet period

Curious what you don’t get? There’s always people will to make a quick buck even if it’s risky and there’s always lazy people who will pay money for convenience (hence why paid streaming is even a thing)

If you have cabal and able to maintain ratio (yeah BTN is ratio less) you don’t need Usenet

But thats such a small proportion of people. Usenet is what I recommend to entry level people who want top tier access but aren’t will to spend time/effort/networking but will spend money m

I’ve found DC++ public hubs garbage. The private ones are amazing but near impossible to get into if you’re not already familiar. What hubs are you recommending that are better than Soulseek?

You don’t own the music so it can be edited/taken away as desired by the DSP

Also me personally very little of what I listen to is on DSPs and a lot isn’t even on YouTube but I recognize this as an extreme outlier

Private trackers really aren’t masters of op sec. They thrive through security through obscurity which the worst kind of “security”. And generally even fail at that (PTP, BTN, RED, OPS are so widely known)

That said I use them and I also don’t use a VPN so I just take that risk. It’s up to you

IP2 definitely sounds intriguing as truly (or close to) anonymous peer to peer

You can use without port forwarding. Others without open ports won’t be able to upload to or download from you and give versa. There’s a sticky on the Reddit explaining this

If you can’t forward ports Soulseek will still work okay. Don’t let that stop you from joining

Music piracy isn’t dead but it’s a shell of what it was. You can see even here most people would rather just stream

Soulseek needs more users though as the proportion of locked file users keeps increasing

Traders are hardly just on Soulseek. Most probably aren’t since it’s so accessible. Most of the traders I’ve seen on Soulseek anyways are scammers who are just sharing RED repositories. Or they’re on dc++ hubs where you can’t have locked files anyways

As the normies went to streaming it became more gatekept and toxic. I’m mainly familiar with the attitude of trades only or straight up selling tracks (eg groupbuys with kids paying thousands of dollars for some shitty Kanye mumble demo). The game didn’t used to be like that. The days of the blogs with mega/rapid share links are long gone

I mean you got all the stream rippers eg SlavArt which is super nice. Soulseek is still alright but getting taken over by traders. RED/OPS around but you can’t just waltz in and I’d argue they don’t compare to what.cd or even OinK. RuTracker still got stuff going on

But when you’re after actual rare stuff that you can’t just buy or stream it can be real tough nowadays. Scene archives can be nice but very hard to get access and it’s mostly mp3s.

They’re going hard still

it’s more like limewire as it does not use the BitTorrent protocol but rather direct P2P connections to other users. In that case it tends to be slower

It’s popular cause it’s probably the most popular P2P non torrent app and there’s a lot of hardcore users sharing over 100k music files including real rarities and mostly public to all. There are some locked file users in search of trades and that’s been hurting the overall community arguably as well as people who ban if you don’t share anything but generally most are willing to share whatever to whoever as long as you don’t download all their shares at once