That's fair, I'm with you there. The thread was talking about paying for these services, like some Plex shares ask for donations, Usenet, etc all have paid options that make it faster/whatever. Those are still costs, even if it's smaller $10 monthly ones. They also add up, so setting up your own server is well within that pricerage, which was what I was getting at.

You can set up the *arrs for private trackers and yes you'd want ratio for those to stay in, but you don't need it. 1337 is plenty and anything that's not on there is usually on archive. That's all I use and I like the weird niche stuff. Personally, I don't even use the arr programs, I've set them up and have used them but I just end up doing it the old fashioned way.

Also fair in regards to the delete as you go. That's just our use cases :) I like having my media permanently and I store a fair amount of rare/unusual things as well as any shows I consistently rewatch. At a certain point it was just less work and wear to keep everything than it was to try and manage storage. I mean, I have it anyway, it wrote to the disk, it's more data and read/write loss to delete and redownload than it is to just keep it stored.

Anyway, just putting it out there that running a server doesn't have to be expensive, time consuming, or difficult to have other people use. But like with many things, there's more than one way of doing something and both being perfectly cromulent ways to live.