Your question is so generic that it is difficult to reply. I'll tell you about my use case then so that you can try to figure out yours.

My goal is to be a respectful citizen. I divide my torrents in three categories:

• rare stuff: for example project 4k77 or the John Wick regrades or Rashomon
• italian stuff: it can be either popular stuff and also rare stuff; italian content is not seeded much so I need to do my part
• common/popular stuff: for example the barbie movie or every marvel stuff

I bought tons of space (recently converted to three drives, 20tb each) and use a virtual machine locked behind a vpn. Even if I forget to paid, the virtual machine is bind to the tunnel so that traffic doesn't go out except for LAN, so no leaks.

The VM has two torrent client:

• qbittorrent: seed the torrents in the common / popular categories, speed capped to 1/3 of my bandwidth
• transmission (previously using rtorrent) for the other two categories

I tend to leave everything in transmission seeded forever, the stuff in qbittorrent seeded until 2.5 ratio or 4.0 depending on my mood.

At the moment I have 90.2 ration on transmission and many many many TB of uploaded stuff. That should be enough to feel like you are giving back

Back to the point of money and piracy, like I said, one “pays” for media in one way or another.

While I agree with you on everything this point is not 100% true. I am paying thousand of $CURRENCY on disks and other hardware every few years but I feel that for every side of the coin, there is a minimum situation (let's call it a floor situation) on which less privileged people may find themselves.

For example if you are a bachelor already struggling to pay to be in college or a child that has only access to their parent's computer, piracy is literally free and you can reach to it without paying anything on top of what you have already. On the other hand, netflix is always $CURRENT_PRICE regardless of your situation.

Btw, thank you for making articulate posts. This is why I am on lemmy.

My point: if you’re getting started selfhosting you have to embrace and accept the self-inflicted punishment. Good luck everybody, I don’t know if I can keep choosing to get disappointed.

I would say that your self inflicted punishment is using windows. Switch to debian and thank me in six months

Brief reminder that most people on the planet aren’t American

So what? Catholicism and Protestantism is ingrained in big parts of europe

As another commenter said, please do it.

In Italy between the movies were screening in the cinemas and dvd releases there was a wait time of 3 months. Exactly three months. The most common way of piracy was streaming websites (like cineblog nowadays) pestered with ads. Before the age of WEBDL most people who couldn't pay for the cinemas and everybody who wanted to have lots to talk about pop arts and trends was watching cam rips. The quality of cam rips were ever increasing every year with specialized forums discussing hardware to do it. I remember you could find everything from low quality phone cams (we are talking 2006 phone cameras) rips to tv quality cameras pointed to the screen from inside the cinemas with tripods.

Project X was such a hyped up movie in Italy that I personally witnessed a bunch of people recording it in the cinemas and everybody at school was sharing the phones on which the movie was recorded during lessons.

To be honest camrips started to disappear during and after covid, but even now for very famous movies like Barbie and Hoppeneimer of Marvel stuff people are still downloading those.

For reference:

• avg ticket price in italy: 6.25 euro in 2022, 5.75 euro in 2016. If you count inflation, price basically decreased over the years
• most cinemas do many cheap ticket nights like for students or young people aimed at 2-5 euro range for tickets once a week or once a month
• more realistically, most cinemas have tickets for 8 or 9 euros, 10 to 12 euros in big cities
• around 60% of people earn less than 1300 euro net per month. That is an hourly pay of ~5 euros. You can understand how much a movie night for a family with popcorns and various extra may cost for a family.

Commonsense 2023

Not only it can be done but I think it is the way to go. You then have to manage permissions and backup only on one database, and the performance improves given that you let postgresql manage it's own IO. It goes without saying that you should use postgresql instead of mysql

Been using https://github.com/Xpl0itU/WiiUDownloader for almost a year without any problem on my server

fuck cars, use bikes

honestly you are going to be fine with most VPN providers. Unless you are one of the members of the very big scene groups, you are just seeding and your threat model is just to mask your connections from your ISP.

I personally suggest to use njalla. Few people talk about it but it's a very very good provider, better than mullvad imho. Allows port forwarding, is transparent about legal requests and have a history of support with the piratebay. On top of that paypal denied payments to them for a period, and that is usually a good sign

I agree with all the comments so far but would like to add my own thoughts. Users are not important. Personally I moved to lemmy because the quality of discussion on reddit dropped so much.

This has been my trajectory:

• avid reddit user and content creator there (not sure if the right term) 2016 - 2018
• lurker from 2018 to 2023
• completely dropped reddit and moved to lemmy

My hope is that we can have the same kind of content and discussion in pre 2020 reddit