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·
    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.