This is the main reason I always preferred running my own arrstack over paying for realdebrid. Besides mullvad VPN going out of business suddenly (which wouldn’t be that hard to switch) or taking down all torrent indexes simultaneously, there is no service that can be taken down using the law that would interrupt my media consumption. And even if all torrent sites went down tomorrow, I can trivially hook back up my arrstack to a dht crawler and ill be basically fully decentralized, pulling infohashes from the ether and downloading using purely P2P technologies with no (practical) central point of failure.
Usenet still works well enough too and doesn’t require a VPN. Bit of a pain to get into but that’s probably the best thing it has going for it. Every easily available source seems to be closing these days.
Doesn’t usenet usually cost money too though? I see them as about equivalent, it’s just that I already need a VPN to access certain porn sites in my state so I might as well use the same subscription and torrent for free instead of adding another cost.
Usenet costs money but has been most hassle-free once I got it going. I pay around ~€10 monthly on average by extending my subscriptions and stocking up on block accounts during sale periods (like now). Subscriptions are usually offered as bulk deals with VPNs too.
Gotcha, currently I just pay $5/mo for mullvad but I’ve considered adding usenet to the mix in case it can find a few missing episodes here and there. But I would be basically doing that only for my friends because all of the stuff I watch is popular, recent, and on streaming sites so I don’t have any issues finding it on public indexers.
