Transcript:

Information about the closure of Myrient

Hello everyone,

I have decided to shut down Myrient on 31 March 2026. Until then, the site will continue to remain available in its current state. Please download any content you find important, as you have around one month to do so.

There are several reasons for the closure: - Insufficient funding As traffic continued to increase last year, the amount of funding from donations remained the same. I have been paying more than $6000 out of pocket every month in order to cover the difference which is not sustainable.

Paywalled download managers In the past several months, many specialized download managers were created that completely bypassed the site, donation messages, and download protections. Some of these download managers locked certain features behind a paywall that required users to pay in order to gain access. The use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes has always been strictly forbidden. Such egregious and abusive usage of the site cannot be tolerated anymore.

Rising RAM, SSD, and HDD prices Since last September, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have surged dramatically and continue to rise due to the ongoing extreme demand for AI datacenters. This has caused Myrient’s hosting expenses to go up as well. Necessary upgrades to the storage and caching infrastructure only exacerbated the problem. With a large number of servers and the aforementioned existing monthly deficit in excess of $6000 out of pocket, there is no way to pay for the increased hosting and hardware upgrade costs.

There are still many other smaller reasons, I could go on and on about them, but nobody would want to read it.

In short, I can no longer afford to run the site.

If you have any comments, you can send them to [email protected] (I will read all of them and might respond to a few).

Thanks for using Myrient over the years.

  • Wizard3964@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    20·
    12 hours ago

    So I thought torrents could fix this. But that’s already in the FAQ

    Why do you not make the content available to download via torrents?

    The truth is that people are only willing to seed the content they are interested in and not obscure content that nobody has heard of. Direct downloads ensure full availability by allowing all content to be available for download, no matter how obscure it may be.

    Additionally, as content in sets are always being added or updated, they naturally also have to be updated anywhere else they are available. Torrents are impossible to update without using BitTorrent v2, which has support for mutable torrents but is not widely adopted yet and has caveats.

    • taco@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      22·
      12 hours ago

      Direct downloads ensure full availability by allowing all content to be available for download, no matter how obscure it may be.

      Until the site shuts down.

      I don’t think anyone’s ever going to argue that direct downloads aren’t more convenient, intuitive, accessible, and generally less risky for the downloader. But that comes at pretty steep costs/risks piled onto the host, which is why they’re so much harder to sustain long term.

    • ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      20·
      12 hours ago

      Why not offload the high bandwidth stuff to torrents and keep the obscure stuff direct download? Seems like there could be a happy medium instead of this all or nothing nonsense.

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      9·
      12 hours ago

      The first part doesn’t make sense. If they’re hosting it, it’s available, whether over bittorrent or http. Bittorrent supports web seeds too, so it can be both!

      It’s true that torrents don’t support changing content very well, though. For that maybe they should look at resilio or something.

      • FrederikNJS@piefed.zipEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        Resilio wouldn’t work well for distribution…

        But archive.org seems to handle torrents pretty well. When they have a bundle they add a torrent with the same content, and set up themselves as webseed… Then everyone can download either directly or through torrent, and choose to seed what they want. If the content changes, post a new torrent… Of course that means that any old seeders get invalidated… But if they care about seeding they could update the torrent and point it at the old download to avoid redownloading everything. But also, how often does this content actually change? If a game iso/rom is ripped/dumped correctly isn’t that data kind of final? Why would the bit-perfect data need to change?