That was my first too. But WinMX was more relevant and lasted much longer.

You included memes (IPFS), and omitted important shit (DC, original Freenet), not to mention some old networks (ed2k, gnutella/G2) that went out of fashion, but are not fully extinct.

As for the future, the situation could get grim at a much lower level, as both the “file” as an ubiquitously accessible unit, and desktop computers in general as ubiquitously available and affordable hardware, are both under threat, with the latter already affected by the semi-fake partial (for now) scarcity supposedly fully caused by the AI craze.

You don’t even need an account to grab from HF. And ironically, the only people who sometimes need mirrors are Chinese users.

It’s probably the cloud host of the sites themselves marking the addresses of the specific servers you use as questionable because it saw problematic traffic from them before (i.e. other subscribers from your VPN service), not what the other users theorized.

It’s one of the reasons why VPN services move to new server addresses all the time. The goal is not beating deliberate VPN blockers per se (which would be futile, since acquiring updated lists of all public VPN server addresses is trivial, and literally everyone can do it), but to reset the reremovedtion of the servers (measured dynamically by automated systems) because that reremovedtion always goes to shit over time.

No. So fair enough 🙂

Even a 20 year should know Napster saga (with all the implications involved) happened in 2001.

Let’s discourage user transparency and AI disclosure

OMG that’s a great move.

The internet actually deleted most “real people having real sex” years ago. You just didn’t notice. There is a reason I specified “commercial” in my comment.

If you actually show modern, or worse, “post-modern” porn to a non-porn-brained person, he will more likely to be put off by it, than attracted to it.

An imperfect analogy can be made to a similar(ish) direction the so called “music industry” went through. Although, the divergence there is less stark, the direction is less universally off-putting, and no erasure happened to good old (and some new) stuff. And the “real” angle is not fully there, auto-tune and co. aside. But it should be noted that very recently (in the last 3 years), “AI” has already been helping automating the generation of the already boringly derivative content, with both tunes and lyrics. You just didn’t notice because all the anger is strategically directed at the full content generation startups (including instrument play and vocals).

Going on a bit of a tangent here, but how come the enlightened never seem to push for simply banning commercial porn, fixing the problem at the source?

Such a move would kill multiple birds with one stone: It would call the pretend socially conservative’s bluff, invalidate the wannabe authoritarian-dressed-up-as-paternal uniparties’ argument(s), and strip the Zionist entity of a big source of income (Do not look up OF’s dead owner. And certainly do not look up where the company is actually registered/based. That second one will render your irony-meter nonoperational. You have been WARNED).

It’s not because most of the enlightened are just neoliberal cattle, right? right?

Or are we still doing the “sex work positivity” COPE-bullshit, which is not something anyone working in the inherently exploitative and abusive “industry” actually believes in. Just like how no semi-neglected child in the ghetto actually believes in, or feels, the embrace of the so called “village”.

The word “acknowledged” seems to have been dropped from the title.

Real power doesn’t exchange hands at the ballot box. And to think it does is the most laughable a notion. But much investment goes into conditioning (a nicer word than brainwashing) people to subscribe to it.

Some contrarians take this too far and use the framing “Democracy is a lie”. But the reality is, it’s not necessarily a lie, but rather, it’s just largely inconsequential when the brokenness exists at a higher level (the modern nation state itself, its establishment, and both their interconnections with inter and extra national powers). In that reality, the voting process is not a tool for the masses, but rather a tool to distract and contain them.

Consulting people, via voting or any other method, is still desirable of course, but only after that brokenness is taken care of.

it’s not about robocalls.

Nothing was ever really about “le evil pedophiles” or “protecting children” either. Yet, using that excuse seems to work wonders with the gullible masses, including many people here, I would imagine.