Just as a heads-up: expect some pushback just for asking.

In general buying accounts is frowned upon on all private trackers I'm aware of, including the rule to ban bought accounts on sight.

Several private trackers give out VIP status for people buying seed boxes through them though I guess there are some where you'd get an account in the first place through this.

It all depends on your goals. Personally I wouldn't trust account sellers. I don't see a way for them to get accounts without it being quite easily identifyable for the respective pages.

Personally I went the "hard" route but never tried to push into the cabal tier private trackers.

Just remember to not screw your account within the first hours by not taking care of your ratio and the trackers rules.

I don't trust them, but based on some assumptions.
They are statically less likely to be taken down. That cannot be argued, but because of strictly enforced rules, most (at least the ones I've seen) do not allow VPN IP addresses to be registered.
The issue there is the user has a forced increase in reliance on the site operator to maintain pseudo-anonymity.

The fact you were able to buy in without any proof of who you are or that I've encountered people just giving away invites to strangers, would suggest at least some of these trackers are not trustworthy.
What protects those communities is their insular nature. Once that's circumvented, its essentially just the same as a public tracker.

Nevermind redacted. They are insanely anal about... Everything. They literally have a rule against letting people who say they want to get in, get in.

Just use soulseek (nicotine+).

I know someone who bought an account and it went well. He told me there was someone he sent money to and they gave him creds to a pre-seeded account that was already two-to-one stats with a lot of data so he could leach for a long time before he had to start uploading.

I'm typically suspicious myself, but the risk is there any time you're doing something elicit. I know I got burned trying to buy weed or LSD when I was a teenager a couple of times. It comes with the territory.

Buying accounts is the quickest way to get your account banned especially if it's a renowned tracker that doesn't do OpenSignups. The staff knows much more than you do. And if you do get caught with a bought account on a big tracker, then be prepared to be blacklisted from all the other big trackers.

Though as I saw from your comments, you don't wanna grind your way to better trackers which is totally acceptable as not everyone has the time/energy to do so. If you want to pay your way in, then there are some trackers that do allow it, either by buying an account directly from the tracker (No Third parties) or buying a seedbox with the tracker's promo code. I saw you got into TL, that's a pretty good tracker.

There's also AvistaZ who let you in, if you buy a seedbox for a month with their promo code, they're a movie focused tracker, their strong suite is Asian movies. You can join other trackers of the Z Family like CinemaZ (old movies and stuff), ExoticaZ (Porn), AnimeZ (Anime) if you join one of them, as you can invite yourself to their other trackers if you manage to get enough Bonus points on one of them (you get Bonus Points from seeding).

There's also IPT which a lot of people may have recommended you to buy your way into. I would recommend **against **it due to a plethora of reasons, the main one being that you're already into TL (and even if you weren't, it makes much more sense to join TL by buying a seedbox for a month with TL's promo code than wasting that money on IPT) and IPT has less content than TL and with worse retention.

Then there's HD-torrent, their prices are a bit on the expensive side but they do have one of the biggest library of torrents with good retention, not as big as cabal trackers but certainly more than other trackers that you can get into by paying.

TLDR: Don't buy anything from Third Party Invite Sellers as there's a very high chance of your account getting banned. I guess you've probably guessed it by now that a lot of people who operate these invite selling sites are staff at other big trackers and selling invites themselves then banning those accounts makes their job of catching cheaters a lot easier.

This tech we all use is advancing exponentially.

And we must be ready to embrace the dizzying changes in the next few years so that we can improve our lives and have better governments.

Besides being slow I think the issues with darkweb can be overcome simply through general interest growing. Currently I personally have no real motivation to use such technologies beyond the decentralized fediverse on clearnet. But if things keep going the way they are, then I'll have motivation. I'm into digital media archiving so if that gets pushed further underground then I will have reason to bother.

I am paying attention of course, Canada is likely to copy cat EU/UK/AUS. Just as a general rule of thumb, but this stuff is in the works here too specifically.

Another thing to consider: handshake.org/

"Decentralized naming and certificate authority. An experimental peer-to-peer root naming system."

meshtastic

Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!

Meshtastic

An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices

^{meshtastic.org}

Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers.

It sucks that literally using something that should be the default, truly protecting privacy, has such a bad reputation because… well it protects privacy.

Two days from now there's a seminar happening in the capital city of my country on a technology called mesh/meshtastic(?). They claim to have found a way to send messages in blackout conditions.

I'ts difficult to find resources but here's a blogpost about it:
blog.liamcottle.com/2024/05/01…

Not saying this is our solution, but I think these sorts of ideas and re-imaginings are what we ought to be in the pursuit of right now.

Getting started with Meshtastic - Liam Cottle's Blog

A few recommendations and opinions on what hardware to use when getting started with Meshtastic

^{blog.liamcottle.com}

Trouble is, there is little that can be done.

Enough folks drank the coolaid, and now we're stuck with surveillance laws masquerading as child protection laws.

Those laws can, and will, get worse over time. However, new mediums will arise, or old ones will rise to the occasion (IRC goes brr). The main thing to do is remain calm, make it a key voter issue, and watch the bastards fold right before the next election.