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.
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.
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.
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 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.