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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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.
Anime (an everything related) torrent sites are also pretty alive.
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