I once knew of a group like this. eventually, thy disappeared - but it was the most wonderful way to access otherwise unavailable arthouse and experimental cinema. I miss it.
Experienced the same. I never got into this via IRC. My main thing was music genres, but also on the side quite some non-fiction(documentaries), and a few fiction. I met some awesome people on Soulseek and went from there into DCPP and FTP. This was around 2007-9. DCPP being the frontend for the users. It was a gentlemen's club and from there you just meet different people who see your collection and who invite you into different circles. Back then, there was an auto trader app written in Java, using self signed SSL certificates (w/o pinning). I never understood why they didn't just use rsync over SSH, but it takes more than 1 person to change such habits.
sc? i used to knew a few groups like this that concentrated on obscure arthouse films, but i've long since forgotten their names about from sc. there was another one that had something to do with a crow i think. hmm.
I actually can't remember. I was a teenager then and budding cinephile. I stumbled on an invitation to the group through an online acquaintance in a completely unrelated message board.
It was an adventure to be able to pull down obscure work from people I'd never heard of previously. As it goes, a lot of the stuff was above my head - but occasionally I'd stumble on something amazing and go deep on that creator. Later, my university had a very good cinema library. You had to request films my name, necessitating research and sapping some of the adventure of chance.