I remember the early days of piracy, Napster, Kaza, eDonkey. People were simply sharing all their files. There was pride in having a hard to obtain item, such as TV shows from the 60s, movies not released in DVDs, etc...

P2P could have made archivists jobs so much easier. This is a tech that should have been the next iteration of internet that we killed for no good reason. Not even greed, just a refusal to evolve a profitable but obsolete system.

People have learned from what.cd. Lots of people have the same sense of inevitable doom you do so there's more people who have put thought and effort into being capable of rebuilding quickly if that happens again. Just varroa musica alone has created a giant decentralized metadata archive(and that's not even its main purpose just a neat side effect) that would make the restarting process much easier.

The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller. Spotify et al really put a huge damper on the music tracker community, and that makes it less resilient.

Luckily the internet archive was also working on archiving the content on what.cd even though the results are not public (yet?).

https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl

What.cd most certainly wasn't the best. They were really stuck up and got what they deserved. I was amazed at the process just to get access to what they didn't even own. Waffles and oink were so much better.

I'm working on something that should be the best place to find any media... unfortunately the VidAngel vs Disney lawsuit has made things a little tougher. Fair use took a big blow there.