Highly recommend people have a listen to the podcast interview from Darknet Diaries with the founder of The Pirate Bay, it's highly highly interesting imo.
I’m one of those old assholes who just remembers the stories as they happened. If it tells about those, it should be a fun journey. Those guys have been through a lot fighting for the ability to torrent!
Over the years, the “High Chaparral” torrent achieved cult status among a small group of people who likely keep sharing it, simply because it’s the oldest surviving torrent.
It's my go-to for western movies and tv - what do y'all use?
My other goto's:
nyaa.si for anime (most of what I watch is anime anyway 😅
fitgirl for video games, if not available search reddit cautiously bc I'm scared of viruses 😅
But for tv and such I'm not too too scared of viruses, they'd have to use an exploit in the codec, and usually they just use a .mp4.exe or similar bc they lazy 😁
If you have the technical knowledge (or ability to follow instructions) you can setup your torrents behind a VPN using qBittorrent and gluetun in one docker container, and Plex/Jellyfin in another with a shared volume between them. It provides you near bullet proof protection due to the isolated environment and prevents accidentally clicking those .mp4.exes since it abstracts file management away from you. It's also super user friendly once set up even if you're not running a media server 24/7 and just want it for your desktop.
If you wanna get fancy you can use the *arr suite of software to do some magic fairy shit including automatic indexing (searching dozens of torrent sites simultaneously), but that can quickly become a deep rabbit hole. Once setup though it's seamless and kicks ass.
Private torrent trackers, usenet, and debrid services aside, qBittorrent + Jackett lets you search multiple public torrent trackers at a time, helpful for when one indexer has a release missing from another.