.ml tends to be one of the most abused top level domains for malware, spam, etc (in terms of ratio of malicious to non malicious domains) similar to .top, .buzz, .club, etc. So, many DNS filters on company networks simply filter all domains of these TLDs (and maybe whitelist a few known good ones) since they tend to be almost certainly malicious.
I filter them on my home network too via pihole (though not .ml)
The poneytelecom IPs would just constantly remain connected to me without actually downloading or uploading anything, which is quite unusual because torrent clients normally are supposed to disconnect from peers that they have no use for. And there would be like 15-30 IPs doing the same thing on the same few torrents. They were using Deluge, a legitimate client, which is quite weird, so maybe their shit was just misconfigured accidentally somehow. I looked up one of them on iknowwhatyoudownload.com and it was active on thosands of random torrents (including lots of CP apparently). I also recall in the past another IP from that range repeatedly downloading the same 80 GiB torrent which I am the only seed on, wasting my bandwidth for no apparent reason. So I just banned the entire IP range since clearly it's not doing anything legitimate to me and is just acting strangely in all sorts of ways. It's sort of a mini DDoS attack (intentionally or not) since I have my qBittorrent configured with a max number of connections.
The Xunlei IPs aren't really attackers per se, but the client doesn't follow the BitTorrent protocol standard and seeding to them is useless since they are incapable of seeding to other people. Some people just ban China entirely but I can't do that because there are lots of legitimate Chinese users on the torrents I have and I don't want to cut them off over something other people do
I've found that the block lists on the net tend to contain extremely outdated information and blocks a lot of legitimate activity, while ultimately being ineffective at actually blocking copyright trolls sufficiently. Best to have a vpn to prevent that. Since I have a vpn, I don't care who downloads from me so long as they aren't abusing my resources. So I manually create a blocklist for IP blocks I've observed malicious activity from. The blocklist file syntax is a note and an IP or IP range (not cidr notation) on each line, separated by a colon. for example, to block 195.154.0.0/16:
Poneytelecom:195.154.0.0-195.154.255.255
(That's an IP range I actually block, belonging to poneytelecom, a very low reputation hosting provider I was getting some weird denial of service looking activity, like 40+ simultaneous connections who wouldn't actually download anything)
Also, if you download torrents popular in China you may come across the Xunlei client, which always reports its progress as 0% and never seeds. Banning these would be impractical game of whack a mole. So instead, simply enable super seeding mode on those torrents. Gone instantly. Might be slower at seeding, but at least now you can seed to legitimate users.
Why the fuck are ads even profitable? Seriously? Who actually sees an ad and thinks "I'm going to buy this product"? When I see an ad I think "fuck you" and I'm less likely to buy their product.
One indication is that they defederate several hundred instances, far more than any other Lemmy instance does, and some for no apparent reason and with nothing at all objectionable.
Please do not. Although I don't personally want to see lolicon stuff, many of the servers willing to host it have communities I want to interact with. For instance, burggit.moe is where the touhou communities went and is otherwise a pretty nice instance aside from loli communities.
It is content which, while understandably offensive to some, harms nobody. All fictional porn, no matter how deviant it is, is ultimately more ethical than real porn can be.
It should be up to users to block or hide instances with content they don't wish to see, and defederation should be reserved for communities that consistently cause interference, not for communities that simply have content which one disagrees with.
You can get a list if you export a copy of your data with the gdpr export thing
They can block other ads, but they can't block YouTube ads since YouTube ads come from the same domains as the videos.
I use rutracker for more curated torrents, btdig to dig deep for rarer stuff and search everything. There's also nyaa.si for Japanese music (and some of the large curated collections). Soulseek (via Nicotine+) if I can't find a torrent
Fmhy. For one thing, most of my reddit usage was related to Linux, datahoarding, self hosting, and torrenting. So coming here is the natural choice. The great thing about us pirates is that we aren't hated by very many people (and therefore aren't banned by the big instances), aren't generally extremists, and yet strongly support free speech. In fact, one of the only major instances to allow nsfw content at all and to not defederate a whole bunch of instances for no apparent reason
If I recall correctly, one of the things that led to it finally being shut down was that having community of people interested in that content inevitably led to them sharing the real thing via dms