There are now many technologies for P2P file sharing:

  • Usenet
  • Bittorrent
  • IPFS
  • Tenfinger
  • more?

And also several technologies for anonymization:

  • VPNs
  • Tor
  • I2P

AFAICT the most popular option is still Bittorrent with various public and private trackers and indexers. Private trackers seem to be the most effective option that communities have converged on.

I’ve tried all of the above solutions over the years and while I think something like I2P sounds great in theory, it doesn’t seem to actually work well in practice. Because it’s not terribly popular, it’s hard to know what to expect.

We clearly still haven’t found the ideal model that can provide both good performance, discovery, access, availability, and anonymity. But do you think we will actually make progress on these problems? We seem to have stabilized on a local maximum.

  • danAEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    That’s not what P2P means though. With Usenet, the articles are stored on a server, and you download them from the server. P2P always means one peer directly connects to another. The reason P2P systems exist is that they avoid things like takedowns (since you’d need to take down every user instead of a central server), and Usenet doesn’t have that advantage.

    If Usenet is P2P, then every other system that lets people upload files is P2P, including things like Rapidshare, Google Drive, forums, etc. That wouldn’t make sense.

    • MEtrINeS@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      11·
      5 hours ago

      then every other system that lets people upload files is P2P, including things like Rapidshare, Google Drive, forums, etc. That wouldn’t make sense.

      P2P means peer to peer.

      Here you have a graphical description of usenet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#/media/File:Usenet_servers_and_clients.svg

      From wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

      When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user’s news server. Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its “newsfeeds”) and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server and should eventually reach every server in the network

      Please pay attention to: Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its “newsfeeds”) and exchanges articles with them.

      hmmm… it sounds like p2p.

      Here you have the fucking RFC for the command to share articles between servers: https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3977/#section-6.3.2

      Even if you check the article headers you can see the path the article it took to reach to you. If the article wasn’t uploaded to your server, you can see that some articles that you are downloading came from different servers until it reached your server.

      Tell me, if rapidshare, mega, google drive, etc works like this. Well i don’t think so, because first you don’t even have different servers from different providers… You just have their servers, so they can’t share shit with anybody else’s servers.

      It’s not p2p for the enduser, but that’s why i said it was server p2p.

      OR maybe you operated a NNTP server with only 1 feed? (which i doubt).

      The reason P2P systems exist is that they avoid things like takedowns (since you’d need to take down every user instead of a central server), and Usenet doesn’t have that advantage.

      If you had used usenet before obfuscation took place, you could see that some articles where removed from some server but still available on another ones. That’s why there was a rule of having servers from different backbones https://cdn.rexum.space/usenet/Usenet Providers and Backbones (Version 2025-06-30).svg

      • danAEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Please pay attention to: Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its “newsfeeds”) and exchanges articles with them.

        hmmm… it sounds like p2p.

        This is describing federation and decentralization, not P2P. The servers communicate with each other. P2P is when users communicate directly.

        Would you consider Lemmy or email as P2P? They’re also federated and decentralized.

        It’s not p2p for the enduser, but that’s why i said it was server p2p.

        Your definition of “server P2P” doesn’t really make sense. Any CDN would fit this definition for example, because CDN edge servers fill data from origin servers when it’s not cached locally, but I’m not sure anyone would describe Akamai, Fastly, or Cloudflare as P2P.

        Usenet has companies running the servers, and you download from and upload to the company’s servers. Nobody would reasonably describe that as P2P, regardless of how the servers are implemented.