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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Tools for piracy are much better today than they were back in the Napster or grooveshark days. It’s actually kind of shocking to me that we haven’t had a popcorntime moment for music again. Nothing technical is preventing the creation of a perfect decentralized anonymous p2p FLAC streaming platform with plausible deniability.

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How would the plausible deniability piece work? If you stream some bytes to someone else, you can't deny doing it. Unless you imagine this working over Tor, idk what the performance of Tor is these days but I never thought it could support such an application.

Music is relatively small. Tor is totally capable of hosting zlibrary without bandwidth restrictions getting in the way.

By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.

Stremio and other apps like Fusion have gone up and been (reasonably quickly) taken down off the App Store though.

Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.

Have you heard of Soulseek? It's an active p2p music sharing platform.

To those of you who might get any ideas from this comment, Soulseek already has a growing problem of people vibe coding "free Spotify" apps that end up hammering a few accounts without giving anything back to the community by hosting. The solution seems to be some combination of automated hosting checks and captchas via PM, which are tiresome to maintain and might just drive more people off from hosting altogether.

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