As I get more and more invites to private trackers, I’m finding that I find myself spending more and more time on public tracker websites.

I’ll only use private trackers if I can’t find what I’m looking for on a public tracker. Private tracker rules can get pretty onerous and I prefer to just avoid the whole scene if possible.

If I’m honest, this opinion surprises me. I didn’t expect to prefer public trackers. I always thought that private trackers were so cool and exclusive. I don’t think that way anymore.

  • splendoruranium@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    8 months ago

    I strongly disapprove of private trackers. I’m forced to take part in some only because the content isn’t available anywhere else. And the private trackers generally forbid re-sharing their content on public trackers, which unnecessarily gatekeeps the content and perpetuates the problem.
    If it doen’t help to make everything accessible to everybody then it’s not a valuable part of the sharing ecosystem.

    • athos77@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      8 months ago

      Do they forbid sharing the content, or do they forbid sharing the torrents? If it’s just the torrents, you can just create a public torrent with a different piece size and cross seed.

  • GingeyBook@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    8 months ago

    How do you go about getting invited to a private tracker?

    I seed all my Linux isos on public trackers but I’m not active in any communities

    Will an owl show up someday with a letter?

  • skele_tron@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    8 months ago

    I used to want to get in on some private trackers, esp cult movie related ( karagarga ) but was always put off by elitism of those rules and systems.

    Instead i opted to upload to pirate bay and like a trve pirate - no questions asked, download what you will - seeded some very obscure movies that i collected. Had to pull the plug after more than 10 yrs because i was emigrating, was a good time.

  • Type 1 [Missouri]@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    8 months ago

    I’ve applied for half-a-dozen private trackers, but they’ve all turned me down. Definitely seems counter to the entire idea of piracy IMO.

  • java@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    I can’t bother joining a private tracker. Of course, they might be useful for niche content. For instance, 15 years ago there was a special tracker, where people shared races of virtually all racing series. But mainstream stuff is available on public trackers.

    There one tracker, where I download lossless music. But anyone can join it, I guess you could define it as semi-private or semi-public.

    • Dwalin@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      8 months ago

      I’m interested in the lossless music tracker. Which one is it?

      • Tweed@lemmy.studio
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        8 months ago

        I’m also interested. It’d be nice to have backups of the CDs I’ve bought in the past, at least

  • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    8 months ago

    I am on a few private trackers but they don’t offer anything that the public trackers don’t already have covered for my use case, outside of porn.

    I am more of a DDL pirate anyways. I have a seedbox for torrents but I tend to stick to mega links, even if there is a slight delay in getting the media. Typically what I find is that all the re-encoded high resolution h265 content comes later and is more abundant on the mega link forums than on trackers; most trackers will have h264 copies at 720/1080, but they’re often larger than the h265 high resolution re-encodes.

    • SchizoDenji@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      8 months ago

      Unless the h264 files extra audio tracks, you’re downloading lower quality (bitrate) stuff.

      • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        8 months ago

        The lower bitrate is fine because I’m usually streaming off the local network, so keeping the file sizes down is pretty beneficial.

  • ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    8 months ago

    I’m kinda in the same boat, except for a specific private tracker. It’s a local private tracker which has a ton of exclusive stuff in my native language, and most of the users also speak it so there’s a communal aspect to it. But otherwise, yeah. I also tend to prefer public trackers, especially for more mainstream stuff.

  • UnRelatedBurner@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    private all the way, only public Torrent that I seed is the Arch ISO.

    imo it offers better security, anonimity, and possibly acts as a dummy filter, as uploads get checked. I also like my rank that I get when I’m actively seeding a bunch c:

    • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      Not sure how it provides better anonymity when all your activity is linked to your account. Should this account somehow be linked to you, a malicious actor would know everything you (potentially ever) downloaded.

  • Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    Doesn’t matter, my happiness is solely based on fulfilling my needs. This ends up requiring a mix of private and public trackers.

    In this day and age its easy to automate fulfilling whatever obligations a private tracker requires once invited, so they are a relatively small hassle most of the time.

  • athos77@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    The newbie blues for each private tracker are a definite thing, but once you get past that it’s great. It also depends on which trackers you’re on: the general trackers tend to have similar content as publics, but it’s the specialty and niche trackers where privates really shine.

  • OCT0PUSCRIME@lemmy.moorenet.casa
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    I really enjoyed the private tracker I used, but I didn’t notice that my prowlarr config got messed up and stopped seeding to ratio and I got banned. Don’t really want to donate to get unbanned so that sucks. Back to public.

  • Dumbkid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    Only in two minor private trackers and meh, I liked usenet better don’t have to worry about ratios cause I use the *arrs. The private trackers I had to rack up like 5tb of buffer before I felt comfortable having the *arrs automatically grab from em