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Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

torrentfreak.com

11–20 of 103 posts

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#11
post #7

Another alternative is https://github.com/the8472/mldht which, contrary to magnetico, strives to be a nice citizen (its author is active in the bittorrent community AFAIU)

Googled the bittorrent community with the acronym "AFAIU". Lol.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#12
post #5
post #2

Interesting. I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts. I'll give Bitmagnet a try for an Indexer. I did find that IPFS, with a pinning service (I won't shill the one I used in particular), was a bit easier and just worked for everyone who tried to use it. But I'd l…

Well for your use case of distributing your own music, Bitmagnet wouldn't be necessary. What a DHT crawler like Bitmagnet does is the following: 1. Take a few initial "bootstrap" torrents and ping them to see which IP addresses are seeding that file 2. Ping those IP addresses and ask what other files/torrents they're seeding 3. Ping those torrents to see which IP addresses are seeding that torrent Rinse repeat. So to…

You don't need to ping anyone to crawl the DHT. You can passively wait and you'll get DHT queries in the form of "I'm looking for people seeding XYZ. Do you have a list?". You can just save those somewhere and you'll accumulate a list of active and new torrents.

Writing a DHT crawler is super fun, I suggest everyone to get a cheap VM and write/run one.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#13
post #5
post #2

Interesting. I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts. I'll give Bitmagnet a try for an Indexer. I did find that IPFS, with a pinning service (I won't shill the one I used in particular), was a bit easier and just worked for everyone who tried to use it. But I'd l…

Well for your use case of distributing your own music, Bitmagnet wouldn't be necessary. What a DHT crawler like Bitmagnet does is the following: 1. Take a few initial "bootstrap" torrents and ping them to see which IP addresses are seeding that file 2. Ping those IP addresses and ask what other files/torrents they're seeding 3. Ping those torrents to see which IP addresses are seeding that torrent Rinse repeat. So to…

That's not correct. Torrent swarms and the DHT are separate. Each torrent basically forms its own small network of TCP connections to exchange data specific to that one torrent. While the DHT is a network shared by all clients that speak the protocol and it's carried over short-lived UDP query-response exchanges.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#14
post #7

Another alternative is https://github.com/the8472/mldht which, contrary to magnetico, strives to be a nice citizen (its author is active in the bittorrent community AFAIU)

I have worked with the8472 to get Bitmagnet's BEP5 & BEP51 implementations working and ensure it's a good citizen on the network - there is more to be done and more protocols to be implemented, but unlike Magnetico, BM is not simply scraping without responding to incoming requests.

We had a discussion here https://github.com/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet/issues/11 With the related changes bitmagnet shouldn't have the blatant misbehavior of magnetico (anymore). Though I haven't looked at its in-the-wild behavior, so I can't vouch for how spec-compliant the implementation plays in practice.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#15
post #2

Interesting. I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts. I'll give Bitmagnet a try for an Indexer. I did find that IPFS, with a pinning service (I won't shill the one I used in particular), was a bit easier and just worked for everyone who tried to use it. But I'd l…

Post your magnet link and I’ll host it on my Amsterdam-based server

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked with the8472 to get Bitmagnet's BEP5 & BEP51 implementations working and ensure it's a good citizen on the network - there is more to be done and more protocols to be implemented, but unlike Magnetico, BM is not simply scraping without responding to incoming requests.

We had a discussion here https://github.com/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet/issues/11 With the related changes bitmagnet shouldn't have the blatant misbehavior of magnetico (anymore). Though I haven't looked at its in-the-wild behavior, so I can't vouch for how spec-compliant the implementation plays in practice.

I'm also open to more feedback, if there are specific areas that need attention let me know :)

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#17
Who remembers Skytorrents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13423629)? Posted as a "Show HN" here, it was a DHT-sourced index and stack written in C with no JavaScript, no cookies, no ads, no tracking. Skytorrents was unbelievably fast, friendly, and complete, and this translated into rapid adoption and traffic growth that caused the site to shut down due to server costs after just a year (https://torrentfreak.com/skytorrents-dumps-massive-torrent-d...).

It was a shame that the technology behind Skytorrents was never open-sourced; it was the best torrent crawler and site I've ever seen, and I would have liked to see how it worked so well.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#19

This looks interesting but I’m a bit worried about the CSAM / illegal stuff part, could a user get in trouble because he has traces of that in his crawled index? Also, how large is the index after indexing for a few months?

An indexer doesn't download content. The only information you'll have is the name of a torrent, potentially its files, and who is interested in those files.

But that's the technical view, what happens in court might be totally different.

Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

#20
post #19

This looks interesting but I’m a bit worried about the CSAM / illegal stuff part, could a user get in trouble because he has traces of that in his crawled index? Also, how large is the index after indexing for a few months?

An indexer doesn't download content. The only information you'll have is the name of a torrent, potentially its files, and who is interested in those files. But that's the technical view, what happens in court might be totally different.

In order to get the information such as the name of the torrent and its files from the hash you do need to connect to someone in the swarm to download that metadata. You won't know what it is until after you've already connected.
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