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Database-less torrent website

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Re: Database-less torrent website

#51

Post by Chris2048 »

tablespoon wrote: post #41
donkarma wrote: post #28

That's not going to stop takedowns, they don't care about if it's technically on your site or not.

> That's not going to stop takedowns, they don't care about if it's technically on your site or not. Yep. "The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29913036 Also the assumptions here kind of remind me of domain fronting: https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazons-aws-latest-to-give-up-... . Basically, it's as…

The "rules for the government to follow" are the laws, and these aren't being made up, but rather pre-exist (safe harbour laws) with some pretty strong backers (goog et al)

Re: Database-less torrent website

#52

Post by roywiggins »

jtbayly wrote: post #40
donkarma wrote: post #28

That's not going to stop takedowns, they don't care about if it's technically on your site or not.

Exactly. I forget where I just saw this. It seemed like a particularly absurd example, but the examples are numerous. Torrent sites don’t have the copyrighted content either, but they get shut down all the time.

But the torrents themselves tend to stay seeded... if you stick the site itself on IPFS and anyone in any jurisdiction can "seed" it, then it's going to be hard to kill by court order.

Re: Database-less torrent website

#54

Post by pradn »

lekevicius wrote: post #20

One unmentioned con: no updates, no new torrents can be added (or, updates require re-deployment of full new .sqlite db, together with a new website). I think there's a space for decentralized database format. Something that would have immutable rows (not the whole db), ranges and search, indexes, etc. Maybe there's something like this already?

I think it's possible to use IPNS to create a key-value mapping where the value can be changed.

https://flyingzumwalt.github.io/ipfs-tutorials/curriculum/fi...

Re: Database-less torrent website

#55

Post by tablespoon »

Chris2048 wrote: post #51
tablespoon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not going to stop takedowns, they don't care about if it's technically on your site or not. Yep. "The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29913036 Also the assumptions here kind of remind me of domain fronting: https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazons-aws-latest-to-give-up-... . Basically, it's as…

The "rules for the government to follow" are the laws, and these aren't being made up, but rather pre-exist (safe harbour laws) with some pretty strong backers (goog et al)

>> "The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29913036

> The "rules for the government to follow" are the laws, and these aren't being made up, but rather pre-exist (safe harbour laws) with some pretty strong backers (goog et al)

That's true, but to elaborate on that quote a little bit: you can still make the mistake the it describes by making up your own interpretations of "the laws," rather than making up rules out of whole cloth. That's extremely common (especially with Constitutional law), and probably the most frequent way of making that mistake.

Re: Database-less torrent website

#57

Post by all2 »

lekevicius wrote: post #20

One unmentioned con: no updates, no new torrents can be added (or, updates require re-deployment of full new .sqlite db, together with a new website). I think there's a space for decentralized database format. Something that would have immutable rows (not the whole db), ranges and search, indexes, etc. Maybe there's something like this already?

What about a distributed hash table [0]? Yggdrasil uses it for network routing information [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

[1] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/2018/07/17/world-tree.ht...

Re: Database-less torrent website

#58

Post by delusional »

all2 wrote: post #57
lekevicius wrote: post #20

One unmentioned con: no updates, no new torrents can be added (or, updates require re-deployment of full new .sqlite db, together with a new website). I think there's a space for decentralized database format. Something that would have immutable rows (not the whole db), ranges and search, indexes, etc. Maybe there's something like this already?

What about a distributed hash table [0]? Yggdrasil uses it for network routing information [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table [1] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/2018/07/17/world-tree.ht...

I think you just reinvented the bit torrent mainline DHT.

Re: Database-less torrent website

#59

Post by ItsMonkk »

oscargrouch wrote: post #43
smallerfish wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. Are you aware of the absurd-sql project? It may have some useful stuff that you can leverage. Also, how do peers find each other? And finally, do you intend to open source it?

>That's interesting. Are you aware of the absurd-sql project? No, thanks for pointing that out, will take a look into it. > Also, how do peers find each other? The idea is to use the torrents as a common shareable resource where given the peers have the same interest in that torrent, lets say the torrents works as a "meta-database" with just enough immutable metadata info, giving the developers of that application a…

Good luck with this, I've been reading all the various HN posts on this topic and you seem to be the closest to the holy grail.

Counter to Moxie's argument[0], I think a lot more people would be willing to host a server, if all they had to do to host a server is to seed a torrent. We already know many people are willing to do that.

I think this would be interesting if the application itself was just a Docker container that could output to a browser, similar to many other local-hosted approaches[1].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208

[1]: https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/plexinc/pms-docker#!

Re: Database-less torrent website

#60

Post by nybble41 »

Gigachad wrote: post #17
etagate wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true even for a torrent btw. And (un?)fortunately you can distribute anything on IPFS as long as it's encrypted.

No one is going to pin encrypted data they do not understand. And IPFS doesn’t get users to seed random files, you only seed stuff you downloaded. So really it’s not much different to hosting it on a personal http server except any downloaders can also host.

> No one is going to pin encrypted data they do not understand.

Select users who have the decryption key (communicated out-of-band) might be willing to pin the encrypted data for the benefit of others who also have the key. There are also for-pay pinning services who probably wouldn't care whether the data was encrypted. And whether it's pinned it or not, as long as it's downloaded the data remains available to be shared (at least until it's GC'd).

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