The internet needs a single website that offers all popular media content in one place. Imagine a platform on I2P that lets users easily find and download any movie, TV show, music album, book, or game without restrictions.
This website could operate like Netflix did originally - offering a huge library of media to browse and instantly access. But it would go beyond just movies and shows to include music, books, comics, audiobooks, software, and more.
The site would rely on user contributions to build its catalogue. Users could upload files, manually tag and organize content into collections, or pay money to earn points for downloading. The platform would make it simple to find exactly what you want thanks to crowdsourced curation of metadata.
Some key features this utopian piracy site could offer:
- Social features like user profiles, ratings, reviews
- Content suggestion algorithms personalized for each user
- Rewards and incentive programs for active uploaders/curators
- Multi-device access and automatic syncing of files
- Robust organization system with custom tags and collections
- Safeguarded privacy through technology like I2P and encryption
- One-click downloading of files, collections, and tags
By bringing everything together in one place, enforcing sharing norms, and facilitating discovery, this platform could be the ultimate realization of effortless piracy. A single website containing a never-ending trove of accessible media. A utopia for consumers frustrated by fractured streaming services and draconian DRM. The piracy world’s killer app.
What do you think? Could a platform like this gain traction and survive ongoing anti-piracy efforts? What other features would make the ideal file sharing site? I’m curious to hear this community’s thoughts on the concept!
Decentralization is necessary to prevent an all eggs in one basket type of situation. An all in one would just be targeted so fast it would be worthless.
Hmmm yes. Though now that you speak of decentralization… Would be pretty epic if we had a Fediverse type platform but “posts” or in this case torrents would be saved across the network, kind of how digital currencies do. That way with enough participants worldwide, it would be quite hard to shut that platform down. Distopian still lmao
That’s actually a pretty good idea, thought It have some defect, in particular, each ActivityPub server have a limited view of the whole network. While it is usefull for avoiding abuse, it also have the downside that you can’t search for the whole thing that’s published on a platform.
But that could be solved with what is called backfilling (that Matrix does incredibly well). Sepia search (for Peertube) also does this.
Mixing ActivityPub with backfilling would be a really good idea. You can share metadata of ressources, have multiple instance, admin could block abusive website, and searching the whole site would be possible.
Maybe I’ll go study what already exist on this side.
(as an aside, Tribler does something similar to that, but only for Torrent and P2P)
Perhaps IPFS could work for it?
Decentralization has always been the way for piracy, since many places inevitably go down throughout the years but it being spread out is what keeps everything from being taken down by a single closure. So while not convenient it makes it more resilient.
i do not think a centralized effort would work for pirated content. look at all the websites that have gone down over the years.
@CoderSupreme This would sadly also be easier for any interested party to block it. i.e. ISPs could block it easier, copyright holders could have an easier time suing the platform owners and have it shut down and if the platform gets big and popular enough (like, for example, how YouTube is for videos of any sort) some content that would be hosted exclusively on that platform would likely be gone for good.
For a platform this big to survive and serve its original purpose, unhindered by DMCAs and stuff, it would be really, really hard.
Plus, the internet now is more regulated than it was 20-30 years ago when nowadays popular names like Piratebay first appeared.
And I personally don’t mind going to a few dozen websites that only a handful of people on the internet know in order to get my stuff. If any of that website gets too popular, it risks closure. Better to only have 1 website of these closed instead of all these.
ISP can’t block it easily if it’s on I2P, something akin to TOR but also kinda different. Thought going against the hoster is totally possible if not anonymous (and there actually are already piracy (torrent over I2P) website on that network)
My friend, you’re on the fediverse and saying that a single website would be the best way to achieve this. I think that decentralization such as federation or peer-to-peer would be a much better way to achieve a pirate’s utopia, because the decentralized approach guarantees that even if one part falls, the whole will remain.
That aside, if I can talk about “What other features would make the ideal file sharing site?” — for a pirate video streaming site in particular, my number one feature would easily be community-contributed subtitles. In the list of subtitle tracks, each track would have two checkboxes, one for text and the other for TTS (this would be used for audio description and makeshift voice-over dubs). For rarer languages without reliable TTS, users would be encouraged to submit voice recordings, which might be anonymized with AI to sound like the TTS voice.
Subtitling would be done with a danmaku-esque system, so that people can choose to contribute just a few pieces here and there and wait for other contributors or continue later, rather than just one person needing to subtitle everything. Users might be able to rate subtitle tracks based on quality and completeness, too. A system of upvotes and downvotes on individual subtitles, as well as both manual and automated moderation, would prevent abuse.
This is a terrible idea. There’s plenty of resources out there that has links to everything you could ever want, why would it all need to be stored in one place. The piracy megathread has resources for everything you mentioned, with redundancies and multiple sources. It’s really not that hard to find anything you need. If I want a book I go to a certain site, if I want software or games I have 2 or 3 torrent sites, if I want to stream TV or movies I have dedicated sites for that. What good does putting it all in one spot do except make that a bigger target?
A lot of folks are talking about how a centralized repository would be a big target for governments, ISPs and rights holders, but I have a different angle.
Who is going to pay for all of that development and maintenance? We are pirates. We don’t pay for stuff. It’s kind of our thing.
Additionally, you are proposing an option with social features and algorithms. Both are a negative because they necessarily encourage users to explicitly say what they have been downloading or uploading in a way that is being logged and therefore is evidence against them should a media company want to push for legal action.
No. There have been many attempts at this, and just as many failures. Centralization is not the answer.
Centralizing the web is how we got into the current mess, very much no
It would get shutdown by multiple governments pretty quick probably
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Theres a lot of discussion here against centralization, but i wonder how possible it would be to maintain a federated infraestructure and build on top a mega meta search engine for centralization of resources
Zlibrary nowadays also have to open different Z point for their services so I don’t think centralized is the way to go. Especially, it’s easier for the government to track everything with modern technology.
That would be amazing and even building a streaming app in too of it to compete with strraming services. Something similar to stremio for films and a music streaming service
Something very similar to what you describe JUST got announced a couple of weeks ago at Defcom in Vegas by Cult of the Dead Cow
well … at least the framework for it … If you want to learn more watch this (it’s a little long but it’s worth it)
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