Been out of the piracy scene for a bit, maybe about 6 months to a year, as I basically have been good with the streaming services I already sign up for. But this past week I’ve rebuilt my setup (my mini server died), and tested it by trying to torrent something yesterday just to make sure I still can, and I noticed Torrent Galaxy was down. Then I saw some articles that it’s been down a lot lately. Does anyone know what’s going on? Or was it fine and it was just something on my side, like a DNS issue?

I hope it’s fine because that was the best public tracker I knew. For example, the show I was looking for to test my setup with couldn’t be found on 1337x (TPB ended up coming through but I don’t trust that site as much as I used to). Are they really cracking down on public tracker indexes right now? Have any good alternatives popped up yet? Is there anything we as a community can do to get around or resist these efforts?

I’m not even a diehard pirate, I like the efficiency and user friendliness of paid services or products, I just like it to be an option when I want to punish companies for customer unfriendliness (ex: I stopped paying for Netflix when they prevented sharing outside of household), and without public trackers the hobby feels too niche and exclusive.