Not gonna point to any alternatives in particular, but the reason sites like piratebay are more notorious about ISPs cracking down is that they’re what are called public trackers - they have lists of torrents which are available to anyone w a web browser.
What that means is if a copyright holder wants to see who’s downloading their hot new movie - because of how bittorrent works - all they have to do is download it from the piratebay themselves & say ‘oh yes how do you do fellow torrent clients I’m just a cool pirate like yall’ and they can see p much anyone else who’s downloading’s IP Adress, and if they’re not spoofing it they can track down the ISP/VPN provider and provide a cease & desist or w/e.
If you want more protection, you can use what are called private trackers - they require an account and usually some sorta referrer or interview or smth. These are where the true collectors are - unless someone invites a fed, or the site admins are shitty at opsec or smth, these are in principle untraceable*. Usually there’s some sort of community agreement that anyone downloading lots of data will at least spend a specific amt of time uploading data, or at least making it available - that way they can ensure that even with smaller communities they can provide availability & quality.
*if you don’t encrypt your traffic & do some port switching stuff, your ISP can tell that you’re using a torrent client, but there’s no real way for them to say what it is you’re downloading. If a copyright holder shows them proof matching to specific times they saw you using the client, then they can say “give money”. Of course we at JustSoZeroCapitalism Inc. are only supporters of downloading from the web’s vast troves of Linux ISOs, and therefore hold no legal liability for anything done in our name, legally.
