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…
Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
61–70 of 103 posts
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#62Who 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…
I feel like writing a fast torrent tracker isn't particularly hard. The hard part is the legal risk.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#63"Unlike well-moderated torrent sites, Bitmagnet adds almost any torrent it finds to its database. This includes mislabeled files, malware-ridden releases, and potentially illegal content. The software tries to limit abuse by filtering metadata for CSAM content, however." This is by far the biggest hurdle to something like this. You'll eventually have to end up again with a centralized curator.
they shouldn’t do anything aside from a disclaimer just opt out of being an arbiter, like public utilities do
Things like this need good signal to noise ratio to survive. Just throwing your hands in the air and saying anything goes doesn't work because users don't want to search through 10 billion mislabelled things to find the right one.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#64Who 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…
I feel like writing a fast torrent tracker isn't particularly hard. The hard part is the legal risk.
This can't be underestimated. Legal is by and large the largest risk of a torrent site. Maybe one day..
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#65How does Bitmagnet compare to Aquatic? https://github.com/greatest-ape/aquatic
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
they shouldn’t do anything aside from a disclaimer just opt out of being an arbiter, like public utilities do
Things like this need good signal to noise ratio to survive. Just throwing your hands in the air and saying anything goes doesn't work because users don't want to search through 10 billion mislabelled things to find the right one.
that’s what’s going to happen though
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or connect with trusted curators over a decentralized network, similar to the fediverse?
Or a baked-in a use-based rating system. That would be cool if it could be protected from abuse.
Then you have a user reputation problem instead… me and my 5 million alts say this is the REAL korn_blind.mp3.exe.
Nothing is new under the sun since the internet was created, these are the same problems that email has tried and failed to solve for 50 years.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered setting up a web seed? https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/06/how-to-add-web-seeds-to-t...
No I hadn't! This seems exciting. Have you done it successfully?
It is pretty common for open source distribution of operating systems, and it works well.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#69I'm the author of https://github.com/anacrolix/torrent (started in 2013) and https://github.com/anacrolix/dht (started in 2015). I have a DHT indexer implementation I developed in 2021. It's currently closed source but available for use as part of https://www.coveapp.info/. I have found that after several hours the search is excellent and stays up to date with ease.
Re: Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally
#70"Unlike well-moderated torrent sites, Bitmagnet adds almost any torrent it finds to its database. This includes mislabeled files, malware-ridden releases, and potentially illegal content. The software tries to limit abuse by filtering metadata for CSAM content, however." This is by far the biggest hurdle to something like this. You'll eventually have to end up again with a centralized curator.
I have a DHT indexer implementation I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39425381. It definitely finds everything, and you need a metric to sort for quality. That metric can be seeder/leecher counts from a trusted tracker, or peer count on the DHT. https://www.coveapp.info/ uses this to grade its search results.