He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.

I guess it depends on the tracker. The only private tracker I ever used was actually for arcade and video game ROMs (PleasureDome), and they structured things so that their most popular torrents (MAME sets) were free to leech but contributed to the upload side of ratio (so you could download the entire thing for ‘free’, but that download didn’t count against your ratio requirement, and you could build ratio by seeding it). It generally worked - at least most of the time, but unless you had a seedbox, a VPN with port forwarding or exposed ports for BitTorrent, you weren’t likely to build up much ratio on other torrents.

I don’t use torrents much anymore (I’m pretty much in the Usenet camp these days), but I wouldn’t really do it seriously unless I paid for a seedbox.

The platform is fine and being able to subscribe across Lemmy instances is nice (i.e. I’m not even on Beehaw but here I am anyway) - it just needs more users and content.

The main issue is going to be getting that critical mass of users, especially on a platform that isn’t quite as straightforward as a centralized one. Trying to explain how Lemmy works to my wife just left her confused and wondering what the point was. Getting people like her to make the jump to a federated platform is going to take time, effort, and - most importantly - content.

It works, at least. The only issue I’m seeing is that if I try to follow ‘sublemmies’ (or whatever the Lemmy equivalent for a subreddit is called) from certain other federated servers, they just sit in ‘subscribe pending’. A fediverse that creates a lot of friction when spreading out beyond your local instance is a bit of a bummer.

I’m glad to see there’s been more of a push for previously ‘48 hours only’ subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.