• Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    It’s just as old as the internet itself. Primary reason was communication. A gargantuan federated forum. The binary-part was just there but not that extensively used. Now it’s the other way round (sadly). Communication is down, binaries are up. As to the legality: It’s federated, worldwide. Some providers do take DMCAs, but (as with the rest of the net) it doesn’t do much. Because first most pir8-content is obfuscated and pwd-protected. And second, the moment something was taken down, someone else re-ups it again :-) Benefits to torrent and debrid and all: Retention. So a thing from 10yrs back you can still get with absolute maximum speed your line can do (and your provider gives you ofc). Fuck seeders and upload-ratio and co. Just get it as fast as anything could be. I usually download with ca. 250mb/s. 100 parallel connections. Only some group’s FTP can beat this. But they’re not for the public.

    As to legally paying: It’s just a service that gives you access to something. like debrid. You can have usenet access just to communicate with people or download linux-distros or anything else legal. Also, even in my very restricted country, downloading is legal. Uploading is not.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      So it’s federated like lemmy? Interesting. So you pay an instance I assume. But does that get you access to all other instances like lemmy? That seems odd, but possible.

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        not exactly like lemmy. It’s more like ONE base of content they all share. But it’s not like instance A only gives you interracial gay midget-porn, and instance B only farming-simulators and C only linux-apps :) But yes, you pay one of the providers and usually have it all. There’s a chart somewhere to which one is backed by whom, and hence the best retention you could get. AFAIK Eweka is one of the root-providers (I use them and they have regularly cheap deals). For automated easy downloads you’d also need an indexer. There are free ones but they aren’t offering API-acccess. You can get those very cheap to moderatly cheap. I pay like 20 bucks a year for two indexers (where one would really totally suffice). Kinda like the same you’d need for torrent too. A site to get your torrent from.