Since you are looking to play single player you might also want to check out Minetest with the Mineclone2 addon installed. It is not identical, but it is an amazing substitute and free.
I prefer public trackers and torrents just because I don’t like gatekeeping piracy. I want those bits to be distributed as far and wide as possible. So anything I get and/or seed will be public.
Even if there are bad peers that don’t give back (which there are many), plenty enough times it’s just people with shitty under served Internet connections. I’m fortunate enough to have a good enough connection where that doesn’t bother me.
I hate the whole meta of private trackers. When I’ve joined a few in the past the whole focus on needing to keep up your ratio has been a larger barrier to downloading than leechers ever were on public trackers.
You can’t seed because several users have seedboxes with perfect connections and already have a billion-to-one ratio. I ‘theoretically’ have access to all this content, but I’m downloading ‘80’s workout video volume 7’ in the hopes that I can actually seed it for someone to get enough ratio to actually download something I wanted to watch.
I was on what.cd back when that was still a thing, I poorly chose my first few downloads and then never had enough ratio to download anything else ever again until I was finally kicked for inactivity.
Instead of actually fostering a working seed economy, most seem to just replicate a capitalist dystopia where a handful of users hog all the seed slots, earning more ratio credits than they could ever use while everyone else desperately tries to scrape together enough ratio to get something of value.
I've been a newbie on a bunch of private trackers, and there's almost always some way to get ratio, you just need to figure out that site's method, and be patient in not-downloading-everything until you can afford it.
For example, like many sites, what.cd generally had freeleeches around the site birthday and the winter holidays: nothing you downloaded counted against you, and whatever you uploaded got added to your account. They also often had artist freeleeches when an artist died; if What was around today, the site would be going wild with Jimmy Buffett traffic. Other sites have bonus points, where you get points for seeding even if no one downloads from you; and then you turn in your points for upload credit. Still other places, you can cross-seed content to get past the newbie ratio restrictions, then move on from there.
It is incredibly frustrating to be new on a site that has a whole bunch of content that you want, but if you're patient or you figure out how the site does things, you can get a lot out of them.
So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn’t really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn’t know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).
I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that’s kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn’t a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.
That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn’t influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren’t broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don’t miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.
At least half my library on both Steam and GOG are games that I pirated, played the hell off and then just bought. Most I don’t even touch after buying them, I just do it to support the developer and actually own something I enjoyed.
I love the implication here, that they don’t have the proper source (or skills left in the company) such that they can remove the DRM which doesn’t play nice themselves so they rely on a cracked copy of the game instead. Been quite a bit of news lately about how game companies have failed to keep the original source code for their games. Diablo 2, the Transformers games etc and those from active companies, there’s bound to be 1000s of games where the source is lost due to publishers closing down studios.
For starters, it scrap sites instead of torrents so you don’t have to worry about that old show having no seeds. But it’s not a matter of either having one or the other, you can have both !
And yet when libgen was broken a couple of days ago it sent me to the broken libgen for the (admittedly obscure) thing I was after. Perhaps caching I dunno. Still, glad it’s there…
I’ve been considering moving to Jellyfin for a while, but I’m worried they will do the same thing in future.
Currently would not be possible. Jellyfin does not have the sort of centralized accounts/logins that Plex does e.g. you’re not asking Jellyfin devs for permission to log into your own server. That’s just a Plex thing.
If you’re asking could they add that “feature” in the future? Highly unlikely but I guess anything is possible. Were that to happen most likely the code would get forked into a new project.
PS - Jellyfin itself is a fork from Emby back when those devs decided to close their source. Myself & tons of other people dropped Emby at that point & migrated to Jellyfin. jellyfin.org/docs/general/about/
Plex is so bizarre. I consider myself a tech-savvy person, but I can’t wrap my head around the concept of “I host Example App on my servers. I host, maintain, and pay for the instance of Example App and servers myself. I also pay for a license for Example App. But Example Company controls my instance.” It’s so foreign to everything you can host yourself. It’s such an unfair commercial practice that I can’t for the life of me explain how such a model can survive. Self-hosting is about regaining control in my books. Yet Plex over here thinks they can not only shove down the maintenance burden and costs of everything down my throat, but also control access to my data. The solution to Plex’s retarded ToS violation situation is for Plex to say shit happens, how about we stop controlling everything you do with Plex to such an excessive degree that the media mafia can accuse us of empowering piracy instead of… the person who hosts pirated media on their server? Plex’s biggest business liability is Plex’s own business practices. They’re practically begging the media mafia to sue them.
Jellyfin can’t block media. The connections are direct. Jellyfin db performance is noticeably slower than plex with 500k media items but it can still handle it
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