I was reading an essay about the way the centralized powers won the copyright wars of the 1990s and early 2000s. (essay was linked to from p2panda documentation)
https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine/
and ran across this quote:
“How the fuck do so many Zoomers not know how to torrent things?” @Ex_AnarchoAnon
So poll time
@alienghic They made it easy and relatively cheap to stream the content so people wouldn't need to torrent it.
That was brilliant - the best way of fighting something is coming up with an alternative that is more convenient. willing to buy is the most convenient one. Not the cheaper, not the best, but the most *convenient*.
So, instead of fines, lawsuits, bans, they came up with convenient legal downloads, got everyone addicted to it, and now we have a generation that doesn't even know how piracy works.
Yes streaming was affordable and super convenient for many years.
and then all the companies got greedy, launched their own competing services with service exclusives, and streaming is now more expensive than ye old cable bills.
And reports are an increasing number of people are fed up with the current status and are looking for alternatives.
Jul 9, 2026, 8:52 PM@alienghic According to current results, we don't have any people under 30 on here.
one just showed up!
though for a long while it felt like we deserved the "naturally occurring retirement community" label
@alienghic @gwendolenau I'm 57 and I don't know how because nobody fucking explains things.
Bittorrent is a protocol for sharing large fixed files that takes advantage of the upload bandwidth of those who are trying to download a copy of the file.
To take a simple and safe example, libreoffice is a relatively large application so they have torrent links on their download page.
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/
if you have a torrent application installed for example
https://transmissionbt.com/
after you download the torrent file it should load into the torrent downloader application which will connect to a "tracker" server to see what other computers that have parts of the file you're interested in to download from.
But your computer will also announce to the tracker what parts you have and someone might download them from you.
For things like free software downloads or archives of big things like wikipedia this is all totally fine.
peertube internally uses bittorrents to help share the load of distributing the video file, so if one video became popular others watching the video can share parts so the primary host doesn't get crushed needing to serve more data than what the cheap server can support.
However people often want to share commercial movie, music, and tv files and because the default behavior of bittorrent shares your IP address, a motivated company can force your ISP to turn over your account information over to the law suit happy media companies.
@alienghic @akamran @gwendolenau It’s also used to distribute files that, if hosted with regular hosting providers, might get taken down, because hosting companies tend to cave to political and/or megacorp whims.
For instance, I’m currently torrenting (making available to others) a few terabytes of Gaza genocide files so they can’t be erased from the Internet.
@AnachronistJohn thanks (and glad you are making sure the evidence survives)
@gwendolenau @alienghic
@akamran @AnachronistJohn @gwendolenau @alienghic
As long as the distribution of the files is legal within the jurisdiction you're seeding them, you're mostly fine.
The trouble is, that seeding material you don't have the copyright to through your "normal" IP will have lawyers crawl up your ass with easy-money-cease-and-desist orders. In Germany there's a number of law firms specialized on that.
There's zero privacy in BT and trackers will just blurt out the IP addresses of everyone seeding.
@alienghic @gwendolenau thanks, I appreciate this.
Jul 10, 2026, 8:11 AM@alienghic I learned it at 38 years old 😆
I was able to go through other sources, though.
@alienghic oh fedi being fedi is going to skew this so much lol
@alienghic 58 and don't know how - I've always tried to pay for copyright stuff as I believe creators should be paid (and also I've had a rubbish and limited internet connection for a lot of my adult life). These days I'm mostly just uninterested in streaming video, though if YouTube ever prevents me from watching it ad-free that would definitely change.
There's a range of moral choice available with bittorrent. There's a site collecting archives of US government data threatened by trump https://sciop.net/
Then some works are out of print and can't be purchased but may be on torrent sites.
And finally paramount and amazon are willing collaborators with the antidemcracy and criminal trump administration.
Why should we follow laws when the rich don't and they use their profits to further oppress us?
@janeishly
It's not unknown for people to torrent something they've already paid for so they can have it in a format that allows them to consume in their preferred manner!
@alienghic
@alienghic trying not to over-generalise here but I suspect the "under 30, don't know" camp haven't figured out how to escape the walled gardens of meta to visit masto and see this poll
@jamesravey @alienghic this was my immediate thought upon reading this post, fedi as a platform is going to have a strong bias towards "technically inclined users"
@alienghic This is honestly the wrong crowd for a mixed sample though 😅
@alienghic every time i deal with shitty direct download sites i yearn for a magnet link
@alienghic my personal favorite (/j) is mega, especially for multi-gigabyte uploads
your download will take days and if your browser tab unloads for any reasons whatsover (for example because it ran out of memory because it’s all kept in fucking ram) you start from 0 with all of your bandwidth quota used up
So many file transfer programs support resume from where you were interrupted. There's no excuse for not supporting that feature these days
@alienghic mega wants you to install a different web browser an an extra extension for that which like
……why not use torrent at that point if i need special software to download. what the hell
Jul 11, 2026, 8:45 PM@alienghic @charlotte As far as I remember, it's only in the Mega CLI client.
@charlotte@akko.chir.rs @alienghic@timeloop.cafe mega held my account hostage because i accidentally uploaded more than the free tier allowed. they locked my account and wouldnt let me add or delete (or possibly even download? i dont remember) anything unless i paid for the premium tier and then deleted all the files on my account after a while. then they had the audacity to send me an email right after talking about how i hadnt used the service in a while and they "missed me". i didnt need any of the files on there, but that shit should be illegal.
Jul 10, 2026, 12:07 PM@alienghic@timeloop.cafe fedi is a social media full of nerd, so might be a tad skewed yknow
@alienghic@timeloop.cafe I know how, but only because my gen X family taught me. By mid to late 2000s, there was almost no need to torrent, as you could just stream. My younger siblings don't know how, and some of my own peers are hesitant about it even when they do know, because they view it as inherently illegal and/or dangerous to do. They don't really associate it with P2P on its own, but piracy and grazing the dark web (in and of itself scary and suspicious to them).
P2P became almost synonymous with legal trouble and inconvenience. Younger zoomers didn't have a need for it and elder zoomers are scared to do it. I do get asked if I'm doing something illegal or am aware of how others can share illegal or malicious things through torrents, it's stigmatised if you know how.
@alienghic i was always under the impression that torrents were not p2p because of the useage off a central server and not downloading from a single source. I default on soulseek as a result.
I kinda shy away from torrents because they seem easier to crack down on wheen noy using a VPN because of the distributed level of there being so many users a file is coming from. It is more likely that one of them is a state law enforcing actor, or is my suspicion misplaced?
The bulk transfer is p2p though the trackers are helpful for getting started.
and yes the standard use will leak the IP address for anyone participating in that download.
However there are legal to distribute torrents. Libre office has torrent links, there's sciop backing up government data threatened by trump https://sciop.net/
There are also ways to protect participant IP addresses but thats more complicated to explain
@Bit_form@corteximplant.com @alienghic@timeloop.cafe from what i have heard its actually that there are trolls who report the copyright infringement to your ISP. also, with bittorrent everyone who downloads it also uploads it and uploading a file is much more legally dangerous than downloading one. ive personally never experienced any problems even without a VPN. (...because i am a law abiding citizen and would never ever share a file with my peers without proper authorization!! :neocat_floof_angel:)
@LunaCOLON3 @alienghic I'm only sharing and trading local band demos so ehhhh.
Not gonna find a majority of the thingsi want anyway, and nobody us going to want what I upload
@alienghic @Ex_AnarchoAnon@timeloop.cafe I mean I don't really need to? everything I needed so far was reachable in clearweb as a direct dl (sometimes slowly)
It is a case when simple alternatives vanish I am going to use it.
Also seeding (in Germany) got quite a few peer (and neoghbors) of mine into trouble, soooooo
(of legal stuff ofc)
@alienghic You're on fedi, just sayin'...
@alienghic my closest experience to torrenting was a 20-something employed gaming buddy who pirated TTRPG books "because I would not have paid for them anyways."
Jul 11, 2026, 5:34 PM@alienghic talk about selecton bias! :D
Jul 11, 2026, 8:56 PM@alienghic I don't know how to answer this poll. I'm nearly 50 and have torrented before but the last time was probably two decades ago
Jul 11, 2026, 9:18 PM@alienghic I'm over 30 and know how to use it, but I can't keep track of where the cool kids get their torrents. I mostly use it to download stuff off archive.org
As far as I'm concerned legal torrents count as knowing how to use torrents.
@alienghic How about 60 "or over, know how to use bittorrent." ✋🏼
Includes knowing to use bittorrent being aware of how this changes your legal status in the jurisdiction you are living in?
I abstained from using it for copyrighted material (but used it e.g. for Debian downloads) as in Germany there is a fine legal distinction between downloading material available online for personal use and providing material to others (which you automatically do when using bittorrent).
But I don't know about the current state and if anyone still tries to track this and starts lawsuits.
At least the cranky American media companies will absolutely start lawsuits if they can find someone.
(There are ways to be harder to detect than the default bittorrent protocol behavior.)
Also I'm not sure how international relations might influence this.
For instance would the EU care if someone bittorrented a copyrighted Russia movie?
Or since the really restrictive copyright laws were pushed by the USA, and everyone else is getting fed up with the USA, will they stop caring about enforcing USA corporate copyright claims?
As an example of pushing back on USA corporate IP law, Doctorow thinks Canada should retaliate against Trumps tariffs by invalidating the anti-circumvention IP restrictions Trump had previously imposed on Canada and Mexico
I am aware one could use measures to be harder to detect.
AFAIK a company would need to start a lawsuit and this definitely happened back then. Additionally lots of things from the US are licensed by some European company who would want to protect their invest.
With the sanctions against Russia the situation in this area would be more complicated. And Russia currently infringes copyright (e.g. it illegally uses a factory and old parts from BMW to build unlicensed cars).
But now we are far away from the original question.
Nevertheless: I love the works from @pluralistic
Jul 11, 2026, 9:51 PM@alienghic my impression is that the younger crowd (outside of fedi) is more into pirate streaming websites, which may be related to fewer people owning computers and big storage media
I said I know how, because I once did. But actually have forgotten and would have to relearn it.
It didn't work terribly well with residential ISPs, firewalls, and NAT, as I remember it. I remember having to use a CLI client on my VPS and then do a direct download from there.
@alienghic over 30, can torrent things with my wife walking me through it, still scared to try on my own since that one time I applied for a us government job in college
It was just linux ISOs I swear!
@alienghic 30 or over, used torrents very sparingly and mostly for iso downloads, got warning calls from my ISP for uses that were completely legal; stopped finding music when napster shut and been too busy to care since. Would have to check whether it still works like I recall.
@alienghic Thing was, if you had friends they let you copy from their hard drive, and if you didn't then how to know what to search for. Without the discovery features of napster it was an isolation bias machine in a way it wouldn't be now that remote friendships are more robust.
@alienghic Some large Windows games with a launcher have built-in torrenting too. I know for a while Blizzard had it with the World of Warcraft MMORPG launcher. Which could help in a multi-nerd household when patch day came and we shared parts of individual downloads with each other automatically instead of pulling down the same data five times.
But that was built in automatic and didn't have any settings apart from being able to turn it off.