[zelphirkalt]

I found their platform quite toxic, walling everything behind login and making the registration and login atrocious to deal with. Hopefully things will change, so that one can just get done what one came for: Downloading mods, without other shenanigans.

[zihotki]

I think that most of niche platforms would become walled behind a login sooner or later due to increased costs associated with AI crawlers downloading every single bit they could reach.

[selfhoster11]

Or they could work on switching to CDNs or P2P for file delivery instead.

[whywhywhywhy]

Honestly no good reason a mod site couldn't be pure torrent based, could have even built it into their own mod manager they had.

[altairprime]

They’ll still end up being the seeder 99.999% of the time, and their audience is typically quite hostile towards them for trying to charge the bandwidth costs to their audience in any manner whatsoever, whether it’s subscription fees or upload bandwidth.

[Jgoauh]

IDK, hosting files and having people download them will always be the most expensive part of the internet. It will never be free, and the money will always need to come for somewhere. And on the internet money comes from adds and prenium subscriptions. I don't think it would even be possible for them to not insentive people to pay for prenium. The only way it is possible to go back to how it was is if 75% of the users agree to close their accounts to reduce server costs enough to have it be free for others.

[diggan]

> It will never be free, and the money will always need to come for somewhere

Yeah, true, ThePirateBay is excellent evidence that absolutely everything MUST be driven by profits.

[Jgoauh]

i'm sorry but yes, TPB and torrent sites DO rely on money, the user who uploads the mirror pays for their own storage, they pay to serve the file to others and they pay to keep their computers powered on when it wouldn't be otherwise, the money comes from somewhere too.

I hate capitalism as much as the next guy but the comment i was replying to was about the hope of the new owners being less profit driven, you cannot be a non profit driven company, and the problem do not rely on the owner of the business but with the system and insentives at play.

Please do not deform my words or this conversation to try to make yourself look smarter than others.

I don't see a near future where every work hour, gigabite, watt and kb of data that is currently required to make nexusmods work every day will be obtained without the insentives of 9-5, salaries and other profit type shit. TPB heavily relies on a low maintenance structure, and hyper dedicaded users relying on the intense belief that knownledge and culture should be free. All things the 'prettier textures' industry do not have.

If you know of or have plans to create a free equivalent of NexusMods, maybe relying on open source technologies and torrents, feel free to let me know, it sounds very interesting altho i think it will remain niche.

[whywhywhywhy]

Most egregious thing was didn't it have a forced password reset if you didn't log in for 6 months, so if you're a normal person you'd sign up, mod your game, come back in 6 months to a year to mod another game and then it takes 15 mins just to get back into the site after resetting your account and everything.

Really surprised such a big community hadn't gotten sick of it already and built an alternative.

[diggan]

> Really surprised such a big community hadn't gotten sick of it already and built an alternative.

There is already, probably the biggest contender at the moment would be r2modman/Thunderstore, which is a relatively game-agnostic modding website + mod manager. Seems a lot more "open" (both in terms of source code and community) than Nexus ever was.

[noirscape]

r2modman is just an alternate frontend to Overwolfs nonsense and basically exists on the grace that most people install Overwolfs launcher (Thunderstore, which confusingly is also the name of the repository hosting the mods - my understanding is that the original devs of Thunderstore sold their repository to Overwolf) for it instead of r2modman.

As implied by negativity in the prior sentence, Overwolfs stuff is pretty awful to use; compared to r2modman, it feels like you're installing a PUP instead of a mod manager. There's lots of ads and it's pretty clunky to use.

[diggan]

I don't know enough about Overwolf to say yay or nay, but it is possible to use r2modman/Thunderstore without Overwolf, since I never had it installed yet I have mods published on Thunderstore + used it in the past for using mods. So I don't feel like Overwolf being bad should translate to r2modman+Thunderstore also being bad by association.

[noirscape]

It's more a warning to not get the Overwolf version of "Thunderstore", which is what they named their mod manager.

R2modman is fine, but because it exists on the grace of what appears to be a third party (Overwolf), it could be shut down at any point. Which is mildly concerning.

[diggan]

> but because it exists on the grace of what appears to be a third party (Overwolf), it could be shut down at any point

The source of r2modman is available, and under a FOSS-compatible license (https://github.com/ebkr/r2modmanPlus), together with a relatively small but dedicated community. Ideally, the actual file sharing shouldn't be centralized (imho), but it sounds overly alarmist to say it can be shut down at any point.

[Workaccount2]

I totally agree here. IIRC you either have to register with a mainstream e-mail provider account or they actively block temporary email services.

I understand only allowing subscribers to download files, but going to extra distance to only allow people to use their main e-mail accounts is too far.

[zelphirkalt]

Personally, I don't want to give them my e-mail address. I don't want them to sell my e-mail address to the next bidder, to make some cash to run their platform, or leak it in the next database breach or whatever. Personally, I don't use gmail or similar any longer. But then all kinds of people put their mods on NexusMods and thus beyond reach for me, without being aware of contributing to an ecosystem, that extorts users e-mail addresses.

Personally, I am also not frequently in the mood to solve shitty captchas, especially not from big brother Shoogle.

Well, it would have been nice to play some mods, but this price is too high to pay for me, so I guess then I just have to treat it as not available on the Internet.