How many people are using torrents for non-piracy reasons?
I’ve used it once in the past to get a distro iso. Wish more stuff used it.
Good point, I forgot that use case.
Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
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Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#22How many people are using torrents for non-piracy reasons?
Installed ArchLinux from iso downloaded via BitTorrent just this weekend. BT is great for me because I live in Thailand and we don't always have the best mirrors but generally plenty of peers on fast domestic fibre links.
That’s awesome, perfect use case.
Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#23How many people are using torrents for non-piracy reasons?
Yeah it makes me a bit sad.. torrents are technically really cool, and the casual anarchist in me likes how they remove the need for expensive infra/bandwidth to serve huge data. Yet the overwhelming use by far is just to pirate vids.
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Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#24I wish more HN posts about software releases were like OP, providing not just a who, but a what . OP: does this support version 2 of the spec?
Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#25How many people are using torrents for non-piracy reasons?
Archive.org supports torrents for downloading huge files (i.e., >50gb archives of content) and the like.
You can probably debate endlessly piracy, ethics, "backups of media that have been purchased but have rotted away due to disc rot", etc. But fundamentally torrents are just a mechanism for delivery of large files or large sets of files, and they work extremely well for things in the tens-of-gigabytes range.
Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#26Looks interesting, why does it require a special font? Suggest you remove the examples of downloading copyrighted content and the yify website from your readme.
The font isn't strictly required – Mabel functions just fine without it, you will just have one or two characters that don't render properly.
I suppose we could make Nerd Fonts opt-in via the config, but I don't think it's that unusual an ask. See: https://starship.rs
The images in the README have been updated.
Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#27I wish more HN posts about software releases were like OP, providing not just a who, but a what . OP: does this support version 2 of the spec?
Thank you! Unfortunately, we don't yet support v2. The upstream library we use (see: sibling comments) hasn't implemented support.
Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#28At this point torrent clients don't provide much if they don't have a really differentiating set of features: - torrents work if they are shared more than they are leeched, so it's just easier to have it run in the background. There's very little reason to not use the existing client/server models like transmission or tTorrent - indexing and search still relies too much on third parties. Integrate magnetico (passive…
Here's your list - you have to use double newlines:
- torrents work if they are shared more than they are leeched, so it's just easier to have it run in the background. There's very little reason to not use the existing client/server models like transmission or tTorrent
- indexing and search still relies too much on third parties. Integrate magnetico (passive indexing), bep 33 (dht-based scraping) and bep 51 (dht-based indexing) and the user gains an order of magnitude of autonomy because they don't rely on centralized authorities anymore
- is there a possibility yo go further ? Make sharing files easier with bittorrent, or something like that ? Bittorrent clients should help with that
I don't think decentralized indexing is a solvable problem. There's too much crap, and too little in the way of useful signal to tell it apart.
What would be really useful, though, would be a way to separate indexing from the actual torrents.
Let me give you an example: say you're a member of a private tracker, and you see some release that looks nice. You click it in your torrent client. It then tries to find the same torrent on a public tracker (e.g. by hash), and downloads from and seeds to both.
If a system like this existed, then you could use private trackers just for the indexing, and then the computers could be left to do the actual work of finding the data.
Also, as a nice side bonus, this would allow for the "long tail" style of seeding that the more old-fashioned protocols have. If you're not seeding a whole torrent, but just a series of single files, nothing prevents you from just opening up e.g. the 'Downloads' folder to the public, and allow them to download if they can provide the hash of the file. This would make it much easier to find seeds, since the limit usually isn't bandwidth but storage.
Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#29How many people are using torrents for non-piracy reasons?
Yeah it makes me a bit sad.. torrents are technically really cool, and the casual anarchist in me likes how they remove the need for expensive infra/bandwidth to serve huge data. Yet the overwhelming use by far is just to pirate vids.
People will use a technology for what it's best at. It's no different from how people use(d) Bitcoin mainly to buy drugs. BitTorrent is maybe slightly superior for legal file-sharing, but strongly superior for illegal one, and so it only dominates in the latter.
I don't think it's anything to be sad about; people use it because it works. It would be much sadder if it weren't used at all.
Re: Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
#30At this point torrent clients don't provide much if they don't have a really differentiating set of features: - torrents work if they are shared more than they are leeched, so it's just easier to have it run in the background. There's very little reason to not use the existing client/server models like transmission or tTorrent - indexing and search still relies too much on third parties. Integrate magnetico (passive…
Here's your list - you have to use double newlines: - torrents work if they are shared more than they are leeched, so it's just easier to have it run in the background. There's very little reason to not use the existing client/server models like transmission or tTorrent - indexing and search still relies too much on third parties. Integrate magnetico (passive indexing), bep 33 (dht-based scraping) and bep 51 (dht-bas…
If you use private torrents, chances are you want the swarms you participate in to be private, unless you're happy to announce your IP to RIAA. I do agree though that the current model in which cross-seeding between private swarms is an afterthought and a pain is not perfect. Clients should handle that automatically without having to resort to hardlinks and separate folders and heuristics to find matching torrents and partial matches and the rest of accidental complexity no one really wants.