There was also a lot less on demand content / media / entertainment available back then. There were no social networks, no mass market smartphones, the internet itself was extremely primitive by modern standards, gaming was a lot more niche.

I was never a huge Star Wars fan, but I of course saw the prequel trilogy in theatres because it was a big deal back then.

I haven’t seen any of the subsequent Star Wars movies except for Rogue One, which I enjoyed a lot. From what I’ve heard most of the new Star Wars fare is aimed at fans and doesn’t really push beyond the barrier of the Star Wars concept.

Oh, I’ve been updating the SBCs. Although my current Pi 4 has been running for over 5 years, don’t see a need to update to Pi 5.

It works great, I’ve been using a Pi SBC for torrenting for nearly 10 years now (in addition to NAS, a media server, Pi-Hole and more).

I would strongly recommend going with DietPi. It has a great set of custom CLI management tools, very active developers and a relatively large community (150K+ installatios active last quarter). It’s based on Debian for ARM so it has a solid foundation.

Sounds like a bad fit, even though I only want to share (it’s some relatively rare content that took me some effort to procure in the highest quality that I believe is available).

Something like Qbittorrent-Nox or rTorrent/ruTorrent for Gnutella would be great.

The use of Limewire in this context seems to be more of an interesting news novelty.

That being said, in any democratic leaning country that truly values freedom (in the real sense, not the polemical American sense), the distribution of such media would not be an issue and you wouldn’t have to resort to Limewire, a torrent would suffice or even another broadcast TV network would air with violation of copyright.

You can stream popular torrents. It can be challenging with more niche content (unless you’re on private trackers), but you’re not going to find niche content streams in the first place.

For me personally, the OG pirating was buying bootleg VHSs/CDs/DVDs. But torrenting/P2P was the first mass scale digital piracy method.

It’s still somewhat big in certain regions, even younger people torrent (although streaming piracy is more popular).