HN user
i permaseeded everything i grabbed for 7 years or i dunno, from the beginning of the site til the end. i never uploaded a single thing. just maybe 300gb of v0 albums accumulated over time, seeding 24/7 forever. it got me hundreds of gb of buffer. zero effort. slow home connection. it was easy.
pretty sure red has surpassed wcd in the size of archive, # of torrents, albums, etc. fewer ppl tho, much quieter forums, which was a big draw for people i've gathered.
i upload unlisted videos to share privately with a single family member. or as a backup so i dont have to store it on my phone etc. silly to assume that people post things because they want it to be seen by e v e r y o n e.
i cannot speak to the current situation, but years and years ago, it was a thing. i had a crappy motorola razr smartphone in like 2012 that i set up dualboot on, and i think i also had dualboot on my google nexus 5, though i could be mistaken about that. it was a thing though.
what about seattle in 99? what about the alf and elf? what about EF!? bookchin, zerzan, cfd, i could go on forever. also, occupy didn't give us graeber, graeber gave us occupy. sounds like occupy was your first exposure to the left in the us.