Do you prefer private or public trackers?

AdventuringAardvark@lemmy.one to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 117 points –

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.

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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?

Yes. you just need to visit an open invite forum/thread like on reddit or on the interwebz.
Keyword: Open Signup

imo get to know somebody who's in to invite you, and you will become that somebody that ppl would want to meet.

I've been having difficulty joining private trackers as well, but mostly I've just been trying to apply to a few that I think I'd like to join. Don't quite understand why I don't get an invite though. I maintain a perma up seedbox, and wouldve thought that was mostly what's important for private trackers.

Go and interview for a tracker like RED (https://interviewfor.red/). From RED, you can get just about anywhere within the private tracker world if you’re a good member and rank up.

There are much easier trackers to get into that doesn't require this much prereading prior.

Private trackers (not the biggest ones though) do open signups from time to time too (ie no interview no vetting, just sign up), so look out for those.

The most important thing is if you're into the content offered on the site - RED's only attractive if you're an audiophile for instance, it doesn't have movies/games etc. Get a name, then find out from there how to get into it. Read the rules on how not to get into leecher status almost immediately once you get in. Once you get your foot into an easier tracker that at least has some content you're into, then make your way up if you want more.

On the other hand, if you can interview for and get into RED, that's a strong signal that you can make in in the realm of private trackers.

That one is hard to maintain. I think torentleech is best for new peeps

/r/trackers has a lot of info, and /r/trackersignups tells you when trackers are open for signup. Too bad they aren't on Lemmy.

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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.

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.

It's the content, presumably in order to maintain exclusivity of the little private club. That's part of the problem, I suppose. Private trackers aren't just an anonymous one-stop supermarket like some public trackers, they're often small personal hangouts, actual communities. In of itself that sounds great, but it always carries the danger of content being held hostage for what - at least in my eyes - amounts to pointless, snobby elitism.

The torrents, because they mess up tracker stats. Just change the source parameter so the infohash changes, and remove private=1 if you're going to post on a public tracker.

Most trackers are fine with you sharing their content. Heck, most trackers don’t even produce most of their content.

But let’s suppose they do. If you wanna share it, they cannot ever trace it back to your account, unless you are dumb and use the same username or something, but even then you can argue that it wasn’t you.

Private is so much better, availability and speed wise. For most, as long as you build ratio with freeleech torrents, you're fine.

I haven't had to get a torrent out of freeleech except for an ebook and now I've got a ratio in the millions

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:

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.

You are right, I was thinking about randos. When I pub torrent an agent can just log all the IPs and I'm fked, when it's private it should be free of these people. I get that it probably isn't but, nothing is perfect.

I'm the occasional pirate, I don't download more media than I watch and therefore never saw the appeal of private trackers. They have their perks, no doubt, but most of what I need can be found on the internet.

If you only watch English content, 100%. But if you are into foreign language stuff then private trackers do have some scene releases that aren't available on public ones.

I rarely watch anything in my native languages, the content we produce is bad, so I never needed anything beyond what public trackers offer and very rarely subtitles.

If you permaseed you don't need to know individual tracker seeing requirements.

How many torrents are you usually sharing at the same time? I find it affects my Internet speed at some point, even if I limit the upload rate...

Not many. I prefer smaller trackers though. If you see a lot of popular torrents on larger trackers, you'll have a bunch of concurrent active seeds.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I actually can’t find the stuff I want that’s missing on public trackers on private ones, so they’re pointless to me.

Edit: Looking for HD middle seasons of Reno911.

TVV has S01-S06 in 1080p avc, and TL has a S01-S08 1080p in hevc

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.

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.

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.

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

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

My home-base is a private forum (DDL). I think of it as a place where people gather the best media from around the internet. We may not get it first but it eventually makes its way there. There are also many exclusive uploads (mostly encodes) but people do some fantastic work with upscales of movies and/or TV series. The user base is also part of the many private trackers the world has to offer. I am part of like 2 private trackers and they are phenomenal as well. I also use public trackers extensively as well as there is actually a lot of stuff out there. I will always try and seed for public trackers but I definitely don't go as long as I would for private ones (just cause I don't want to get dinged) (Yeah I could use a VPN but too lazy, even though I am in a place that don't give many fucks about media piracy). I prefer DDL because I don't have to maintain ratio, but I do understand that with private trackers there can be some more longevity (but isn't really guaranteed). There are also other private trackers of the index variety that aren't built around ratio which can be nice.

There can be a lot of rules with private trackers, and yes some of them are really annoying, not gonna lie. The rules are there for a reason, for the most part. For some it's about building a community, while for others it's about making sure stuff survives for as long as possible. There are so many tools for a fellow seafarer to have and private trackers are just one of them and they serve a purpose. I am of the belief that all information should be available to everyone forever, but the world don't work like that and the long dick of the law can really fuck you life up. I think a valuable lesson from private trackers is that it makes one not just be a leech and makes one give back. There is nothing wrong with leeching, but I always like to think that piracy is about sharing the wealth. (not trying to moralize piracy, to each their own)

But as you said, public trackers have A LOT of stuff. So much media can be found on them. Private trackers help if you want the best of the best with regards to certain media or for hard to find stuff. Each have their place and it all about using the tools available to you

Indifferent.
I use both torrent und usenet, public and private trackers and indexers.

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

I just recently decided to donate to a certain private tracker and fuck man its so nice. It has so much and its all good. Plus you know the quality will be legit on the highly seeded items. Since i donated it gave me a boost on my ratio, which even with my mediocre connection is fairly easy to keep good

Public but that’s because I always find what I am looking for and don’t see a need for a a private tracker.

Provate tracker. We are there for each other and together we have an awesome collection of linux isos

Private trackers aren't dominated by people who waste my bandwidth downloading all day at maximum speed and never contributing back.

My private tracker days are behind me after they shut down OiNK, and then later what.cd. Though I can't say I don't miss it sometimes. At its peak, What was an amazing place.

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.

Private, I like sharing in a community. Particularly like the Nordic one I'm in, they make sure everything has nice subs. There's also a few quirky torrents on there, like a collection of very old and niche Swedish PC games, many of which I remember fondly from when I was young.

What's the proportions of Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Danish content on there? I've been trying to get into some more private trackers apart from MAM and TL

I couldn't tell you really since I'm only looking for one of them. But I think it's predominantly Swedish, or maybe it's just bias. 😄

I prefer private, but only a few that aren't to crazy with the rules. Ratio is easy enough to maintain with some freeleech torrents set to seed forever, all other torrents get set to whatever the minimum seed requirements are. The selection, quality, and speed are so much better that I don't mind putting in that little bit of effort. Public trackers are my last resort.

That said, any torrents are secondary to Usenet. That subscription is worth every damn penny.

Private trackers have, always been a bunch of snobby dingleberries

Private. Speeds are much better and your stuff lasts longer. I tried several times to have public options for my Coliseum Video uploads and all have failed in some way. At least with private trackers, I know that they’ll stay seeded for a long long time.