It be nice if some private trackers offered a forum section, similar to invite section, that offered advertising these behind a certain rank.

I'm on one that is, behind a PT that you have to like apply and get into after a certain rank on the tracker.

Yeah like others mentioned, I would strongly advise against doing this. Will probably get scammed or cabal banned at worst too.

But my advice if you have the money to spend and want to just easy access, look at the donation signups that Brickfrog mentioned.

In particular, I think TL, PHD, HDT, AvistaZ, and CinemaZ are worth while to donate and join.

I have found other services like Tidal aren't as advanced with their DRM it seems, I'm able to download using some command line CLI off github full FLACs and everything.

For remuxes I find BLU internals (WiLDCAT, BLURANiUM, CONSORTiUM, PmP etc) to be solid. I find a lot of them really go the extra mile and make a definitive remux with best video qualities, audio qualities, subtitles, chapters etc. They aren't really racing for the fastest release but building quality remuxes.

As far as like remuxers that race to do the latest releases, CiNEPHiLES, EPSiLON, FraMeSToR, KRaLiMaRKo, TRiToN, and LEGi0N I'd prefer in that order I'd say...but they often are just aiming to do a plain one source remux from a single blu-ray and not much else. Some opting for custom discs or make mistakes with bad DV layers etc.

I think above all else. BLU does a really good job of curating the best remuxes possible. They have a few individual users who do great remuxes but aren't like big groups...and a whole program where they mark ones as BLURANiUM approved.

For WEB-DL HONE and FLUX I think are the best that are active. NTb often won't do a hybrid DV HDR release and it's annoying. HONE is also great because they do H.265 for 1080p. Otherwise most are fine really...

For movie encodes, I typically will just grab the 1080p HDR encodes that are available or otherwise just a 1080p x264. Lot of the HDB and BHD internals basically here, the Aither internals are good too...but lot of the time I do it myself from a good remux!

I often grab re-encodes for older TV series with way too many episodes and I don't care about quality as much in particular. QxR, TAoE, EDGE2020, Vyndros, YAWNiX, iVy are good in my book.

It's certainly alive and exists.

But access to music is easy and affordable. It's more inconvenient for me to pirate it than just use a streaming service.

I also listen to a lot of independent artists and rather buy their stuff to support them.

Curiosity Stream, Nebula, Tidal, Soundcloud, Spotify, Prime, and a Plex share basically.

I'm aware of IPT being hated by lot of the torrenting community, but it's still probably the easiest alternative to TL. I would always suggest TL before IPT.

The other general trackers are harder to get into, and if I'm speaking to just people who really don't care about grinding up trackers then TL or IPT are the logical suggestions for large private general trackers.

The guy got banned from TL. Probably won't have the patience or care to like go through MAM, RED, OPS to join some better regarded trackers.

IPTorrents is probably the best alternative to TorrentLeech as far as large general trackers go that are relatively easy to join

I really like Lemmy as a platform, but I still keep going to Reddit a bit because that's where people are. Particularly local communities haven't been interested in moving.

I think only an extremely authoritarian government could, who doesn't care about what the citizens think....if that was what they cared to stop.

Excluding that, stopping piracy wouldn't really be something popular with voters and probably would be very expensive to enforce. i.e look how SOPA and PIPA went down in the US.

So many games...SOMA, Outer Wilds, NieR Automata

More of a personal answer but Persona 4 Golden on the Vita.

I had just started college and moved out to the dorms for the first time. Was very homesick and depressed. Being able to just take my Vita to somewhere on campus and chill playing that was very comforting.

Most accessible would be imo are TL, IPT, PHD, HDT. You can join all these trackers right now with a donation or buying a seedbox for one month to get an invite.

TL/IPT are general trackers, I would prefer TL over IPT personally, they have a good amount of HQ encodes, remuxes, WEB-DLs....but I also find them good for re-encodes / x265 encodes. Particularly when you don't need the best quality of some TV series and want to save space. Groups like QxR (ImE, Silence, Panda, Tigole, etc), TAoE, Vyndros, EDGE2020, YAWNiX, etc are pretty good for them here. TL also opens often for free signups, they probably will like 2 more times this year, usually around holidays.

PHD/HDT I would consider more "HQ/HD trackers" they have restrictions not allowing some uploads, i.e trackers like these will usually ban those x265 groups I mentioned before deeming too low quality. But they have lots of remuxes, web-dls, and HQ encodes. PHD in particular usually is very fast with pre-times on latest p2p releases from groups like NTb, TEPES, FLUX, LAZY, KiNGS, etc as they upload. They also have a lot of remuxes from EPSiLON and their current remux group TRiTON.

I can't comment much on IPT or HDT, but know they are similar to TL and PHD respectively.

The downside of these trackers, generally, they're dead ends to getting into other trackers. They don't have invite forums. PHD has a way to access the AvistaZ sister sites....trackers to get into other trackers becomes a whole different can of worms.

Personally, I've moved onto different trackers for the most part...but do still occasionally use PHD and TL. Sometimes PHD is faster to upload things. Sometimes, just by the sheer size, TL has more stuff. I would have said look into /r/opensignups for when trackers open up...but on the fediverse I don't know a comparable place.

Hopefully this helps!

Seems solid, I was really excited for Mastodon and loved the idea but.......I didn't really use Twitter much so I didn't have a need for it still.

Reddit has always been my go to social media so I'm glad a fedi version of it exists with lemmy!