Not sure why you’re being downvoted for expressing an opinion… an opinion based on current trends, at that. Mangadex just had a large chunk of work wiped out and many translations are only on Mangadex or translator websites with no torrent. This is a fact. Not hard to be worried that further takedowns will affect access to niche manga.
that statement has been used so universally sarcastically that no one believes you’re being serious when you say it now.
Soulseek is a simple peer-to-peer sharing network. You can share directories and see other users shared directories when they are online. It can be a bit flaky but is a useful tool.
yt-dlp downloads from youtube will be in youtube quality, so ~128kbps VBR opus most of the time. Sometimes ~256kbps VBR if you have Premium. I still find it handy for hard to find recordings and new albums etc that have not been shared in flac yet.
IIRC port forwarding is more of a problem with seeding than leeching.
Fair point. Although the problem with those sketchier sites is they usually slap watermarks all over the images and scrape the first release of a chapter regardless of the translation group, which results in very spotty quality. There are absolutely series where certain translation groups or anonymous uploaders snipe it with terrible quality and it’s not worth reading until the better group translates it, but the scraper websites don’t update their chapters.