It could be that your torrent program is firewalled, and unable to fully connect to all sharing peers.

If you’re using qBittorrent, to display the Status Bar, go to the menu item View > (check the box for) Status Bar

The Status Bar should appear a the bottom.

Just right of center, there should be an icon where if you hover your mouse over it, tells you your Connection Status, i.e. whether you’re connected or firewalled.

JDownloader is a tool whose continued development is well worth supporting.

I believe that eD2K was the next P2P to gain wide popularity after those went down.

It’s de-centralized, so unlike Napster/Kazaa, the feds can’t take it down by seizing only one server, which they have tried.

Consider non-torrent P2P platforms like eMule/eD2K. If you know what the name of you’re looking for, there’s a fair amount of obscure material to be downloaded that can be difficult to find otherwise.

eD2K is slow, but effective.

https://forums.mvgroup.org/index.php is my go-to for documentary torrents.

Torrenting on Android does exist, but it’s such a battery suck that seeding is unsustainable unless your mobile device is plugged in all the time. Which makes it not-so-mobile.

And then there’s mobile plan data limits.

Gen X here. I still use my eMule client! Because you just share whole directory structures, it’s great for finding and sharing older obscure stuff.

I’ve always found Super Video Converter to be very useful and easy to use for video conversion.

https://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

The first couple of weeks on a private tracker are always pretty rough, until you can build up your ul/dl ratio high enough to get some breathing room.

Some sites make things easier on newbs than others.

If possible, look for recent freeleech torrents, especially popular ones, download them even if you aren’t really interested in the content, and seed them 24/7 to build your ul stats…

You have at least 10 years from when your tapes were written.

Hope the device you have to read them still works …

I just signed up for Matrix because you mentioned it.

I installed the Element front end, because that seems to be the most popular.

It looks like IRC, which is fine if that’s all you need.

It also appears that anything beyond text has to be hotlinked, which is understandable, given that the amount of data transmitted for redundancy between home servers is exponential with the number of home servers.

Really very similar to Lemmy, where the identity of each group is tied to a particular server, e.g. lemmy has !anime@ani.social but Matrix has #anime:matrix.org

So what happens if matrix.org goes away or decides the server admin wants to be hostile to #anime?

What kind of system that depends on centralized servers can ever be secure from government snooping?

That kind of architecture is completely hopeless in that regard.

Is a encrypted, distributed, P2P architecture realistic though?

How to cut off PS online verification: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenP/comments/1624ybw/how_to_fix_photoshop_we_cant_verify_your/

But the tool they recommend using, GenP, does trigger Windows Defender warnings because it modifies binaries, so read the installation instructions carefully.

Or migrate to FOSS software, or pay Adobe to use their product.

There are some specialty content, such as British TV and Asian TV and movies, or complete archives of porn sites, that don’t appear regularly on public torrent sites, or streaming sites for that matter.

If you never watch that kind of thing, then you don’t need to sign up for a private tracker.

The same caution is advisable when searching for any free software.

There’s all kinds of malware, adware, and just plain malicious crap that shows up in search engine results.

The corollary is that a book has to be in-print, or commercially distributed in e-book form, to have any sales.

If neither new printed copies, or commercially sold e-books are available, then taking down pirate sites, or even an archive like archive.org, only diminishes the collection and availability of human knowledge and literature.

So like the Radio Shack TRS-80 “Trash 80” Model 100 from 1983… https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/18/316/1684

Azure is MS’s cloud computing. As long as you weren’t using MS OneDrive, or 365 Office, or something else that relied on MS cloud, you’re good.

Don’t blame the writers, some of whom are long dead, and some titles are long out of print.

Yes, I did try to install it on Windows.

Still, that really disqualifies it from being open source…

Like “free” software requiring installation of weird browser toolbars back in the day. I still have nightmares about those things.