I feel like most people won’t want to buy it if they look at this page though lol

For streaming/discovery, custom cli application that scrapes Bandcamp ‘recommended’ albums to get associations between them and considers what I’ve liked and disliked for probability weights determining what to play next, playing them with mpv.

For actually downloading stuff I like enough to want to save, I have a dedicated button to take the url in my clipboard and save audio files from it to my music folder with a script that uses yt-dlp

That’s your own addition though, it isn’t entirely clear that the person you questioned was talking about issues separate from its power structure.

Company policies aside

That’s kind of by far the most important class of problem though. I could complain about the complexity of its notifications system, or how all the ‘servers’ are represented with image icons and it sucks to navigate and find the one you’re thinking of if you add a lot of them, but it’s all small potatoes compared to being run by an enshittifying company complying (often in advance) with terrible laws and moving to use their accumulated leverage against their users. By developing a reliance on their service you put them in charge of you, but they cannot be trusted with that.

Now what?

I was very disappointed that the rest of this paragraph didn’t go in a completely different direction

But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product

I agree with your conclusion of not watching it, but the reason that companies might observe and take a non-purchase as some kind of hypothetical market signal doesn’t seem like the strongest argument for that, especially if people are avoiding the purchase specifically to deny them money for ethical reasons, that’s not something they can resolve by making ‘the right product’.

If pirating a Harry Potter show provides support to its author, I think that support is going to be more in the form of cultural relevance and mindshare than anything directly financial. Being a fan of an IP gives other people a reason to engage with it because your interest signals things to other people, like it means that by not watching it they might be left out of the loop etc, and since the law enforces property rights over what can be done with it and who can profit, that adds to the power of its owner by influencing the choices and interests of other people in their favor.

It seems that accounts aren’t required to download models or participate in the torrent swarm and have a somewhat reasonable justification of needing a way to maintain model provenance, which afaik pirate sites also require accounts for uploads for similar reasons:

Hugging Face verification confirms that someone claiming a creator’s handle controls the matching HF account or organization. It helps prevent impersonation and preserves attribution as models spread beyond their original host.

It’s also reasonable to have a centralized API since a lot of software in the ecosystem has using the huggingface API as a default way of doing things, so that makes sense for the goal of resilience to huggingface getting locked down somehow in the future.

The gamification-ish features do seem a little contradictory with the stated “decentralized infrastructure” objective though:

Pirate Face is preparing community benefits for account holders, including free compute credits and exclusive model releases.

Also loses points with me for (as far as I can see) not publishing a code repo, and the writing on the website having a very AI generated style which combined with the goals and features being a bit all over the place makes it tough to get a read on the project’s ethos and intentions.

Not sure. For the sake of speculation, one possibility is that the maximum liability to Meta is billions of dollars, which they can clearly afford, but if it targeted an individual that individual could declare bankruptcy as is common in high award amount piracy lawsuits against individuals (and maybe they pay him off under the table afterwards). Maybe he just didn’t think about it too hard. Maybe the risk of such a lawsuit succeeding is actually low somehow. Strike 3 seems to really want to tie it in to their existing case against Meta, probably to bump up the number of infringing works they can include:

Last summer, the company took aim at a much larger target. Together with Counterlife Media, Strike 3 sued Meta, accusing the tech giant of downloading thousands of its films via BitTorrent to train AI models. With 2,973 films at stake, the case could be worth up to $446 million

Maybe, although it looks like the company is trying to say they didn’t do it

However, even if the subscriber is who Strike 3 claims, Meta argues that nothing ties the downloads to the company.

“They simply assume that the Subscriber is responsible for everything done on the IP address, and then leap to the additional, similarly unsupported assumption that he did it for Meta,” Meta writes.

So presumably the executive himself would not be able to use an “it was for AI” defense since they don’t even want to admit it

Yeah, I am noticing that when I sort by ratio the stuff at the top I mostly didn’t like that much

Better discovery systems would be nice, with the huge amount of media out there I’ve never heard of, there has to be a large subset of it that I would love but just isn’t on my radar

Maybe in hopes that youtubers and streamers will play the game on their channels if they got it for free? That’s probably what is meant by ‘to get content on our game’.

Some seedbox services seem to accept cryptocurrency, although if they don’t accept an anonymous one like Monero then you’ll need to do some extra steps to remove the ability to trace the transactions. They may use a third party crypto payment service that will try to ID you so that’s another potential hurdle (after some googling I found a seedbox service that’s using bitpay, and bitpay has hassled me for using a VPN before). Possibly there’s a wider range of options with VPS providers.

…As an alternative to a streaming based solution. Given the context OP was not talking about just installing jellyfin, the fair comparison would be everything required to make it work.

Something I recently realized I can do that might be relevant to someone: if your VPN client has a “Local network sharing” option in the settings, that can be used to connect to your torrenting machine without turning the VPN on and off every time. I torrent into a shared drive and also use that machine to run other (local network) servers, so this is really useful. If it doesn’t have such an option, maybe there is still a way to enable non-vpn connections from the ip range of your local network.