Wow small world. Have you played Spitzer?

You don’t need to. But it’s probably a good idea for the same reason as with BitTorrent.

Reading through the docs about it here, it sounds like it’s only an indexer, not a tracker.

Well fuck me. I mean I don’t think that’s an immediate issue for me but that does suck.

EDIT: Although if we’re being honest, has PIA been found doing anything shady in the 7 years since they were acquired?

Do people not recommend PIA anymore? I’ve used it for a long time and never had issues. Supports port forwarding. Audits have shown they don’t store activity logs, and they even run RAM-only servers.

EDIT: Just looked at AirVPN. It’s nice they don’t request any identifying info on signup.

I agree the transport layer is good and having anonymity in a different layer works. I think my main gripes with it today are:

1. Anonymity is paid for and trust-based. It’d be awesome if something like I2P started working well enough that anyone could have anonymity for free without needing to trust a company or worry about poor performance.
2. Private trackers. While I understand the logic behind this form of community (incentivize seeding and make bans meaningful), I think it’s possible to solve those problems with a public tracker. I have ideas on how this could work if anyone is interested.

I haven’t tried SoulSeek. What does it do better than Bittorrent?

EDIT: After playing around with SoulSeek, it seems pretty cool, although the amount of time it takes to scan your files on startup is laughably bad.

Public trackers never seem to have as good of releases or swarm health, except for the most popular content.