Cid Vicious

Getting an account on a big general tracker like TorrentLeech is a pretty good foot in the door. They do open signups frequently. There’s also IPtorrents and their whole network, although they’re pretty looked down upon by the private trackers community. If you want to start working towards invites to more selective trackers, MAM, OPS, and RED all have an interview process. MAM is by far the easiest one to build a ratio on, although note that they do not like to be thought of as a stepping stone.

The specific devices impacted by this are pretty old (I think only the first and second gen ones? So at latest 2009), so honestly I doubt they’re very worried about it.

You can still use calibre to sideload onto them. Where you get the books is another issue.

Are there endless wars? A lot of people don’t like .ml, lemmygrad, and hexbear and they’re defederated by a lot of instances, but that’s not really a hot war. Outside of that most drama seems to be about certain mod/admin decisions. But that kind of feedback loop is by design. People are supposed to have opinions on whether they think instances are well run and aligns with what they’re looking for…and if it doesn’t align, that would be a good reason to switch instances. I see more fretting over how to make Lemmy more popular than arguments about instances.

I’m curious how well polished the stuff you get off of soulseek is. Private music trackers have pretty strict standards for uploads, which generally means making sure that everything is organized consistently, that all tracks are tagged correctly, and that things are encoded to high standards (filtering things like bad transcodes). If you’re having to manually check all of this stuff, it would be pretty time consuming for a large collection.

OPS is probably the one you want. RED has more selection but also a very difficult economy. OPS still has a great library and the economy is far more manageable. Of course you will still need to build up a ratio if you’re planning to download a lot

You might want to get on a general tracker like TorrentLeech that has 0day scene releases. But you won’t find as good retention on older releases. It works as a nice supplement to a more selective tracker.

You mention that PayPal was bought by eBay (in 2002) but not that it was spun off again in 2015. They’re separate companies. If anything, Venmo is a competitor of PayPal.

Defaulting to any one instance would be against the goals of federation, I think. Much better to have a centralized site to help people find an instance that uses factors that wouldn’t bias too much. Perhaps pushing towards “general purpose” instances that would make geographical sense. And then you could highlight instances that cater towards more specific groups. But I think the goal of this would be to spread users across many instances rather than funnel them all towards one.

I might propose having something things like server ping be a factor, and capacity of the instance. Perhaps instances could also be shown with their largest communities so that people could see the vibe of the instance before they join.

Apple basically killed any chance ogg had by not supporting it on ipods. Which was unfortunate.

Most people are archiving in FLAC but the reality is that almost nobody can hear the difference between 320 (or even V0) and FLAC. So in cases where the disk space makes a difference mp3 still makes sense.

Literally the first phones labeled “smartphones” were things like the Handspring Treo that ran PalmOS.