I miss the days when it was easy to find content on Napster and later Kazaa. Today, Solseek seems to be the only p2p network that still preserves that feeling while gnutella fells more like a graveyard and torrent needs external trackers.
Is there any decentralized p2p network where it is easy to find content nowadays?
Agree with you. I fondly remember the days of browsing and trying to get invited to DC++ hubs and trying to add more local data in order to see more. Gone are those days.
We're so close as well! P2P is stronger than ever, especially torrents who have very mature implementations now. We're just missing being able to distribute the metadata in order to get the torrents (or magnet links) to be P2P as well, something like TPB on a P2P network would make things unstoppable.
Having a distributed search engine is far from easy (there's the main issue of trust in the index). It's possible to do it the other way around, thanks to DHT scraping being allowed: everyone can scrape the peers and build an index at home, with tools like magnetico (https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico) for example
Afaict magnetico is a selfish implementation. It takes resources from the network but doesn't provide any back. If everyone ran that at home instead of a proper DHT node then the network wouldn't work.
That said, it used to be far worse (actively polluting others' routing tables) and it's nice seeing BEP51 validated as a proof of concept.
I think magnetico is not expected to replace a proper DHT node but be run in parallel: one is naturally present because you're a peer in any amount of torrents, the other is using the network for searching. I'd expect both to be running on the same machine.
After a few weeks of running it I know have a 2.6GiB database of torrents. I wouldn't expect a standard torrent node to include this feature, especially because the value of magnetico only comes when the database is big enough.
That said magnetico should definitely be a standard node in the network, it's light enough that it can do it
> That said magnetico should definitely be a standard node in the network, it's light enough that it can do it
Maybe in the future. As things are right now, magnetico is a huge bandwidth eater and will literally eat all available bandwidth if it can, doesn't seem to have any limits setup today so if you want to be able to do other things at the same time, you have to limit the process/IO manually.
Why can't simply .torrent files be distributed using gnutella2? Both services could then be integrated and we would automatically get decentralized distributed search and sharing.
To some degree, the paid services (itunes) won out by making it so easy to use. There wasn't a viable paid alternative in the hayday of p2p file sharing.
Do you know if anyone has explored the viability of smaller-scale file sharing? As in I make my content available directly to my friends, and they can search over my and their friends content? Privacy leads to better security as there is potentially no central server or network to compromise...
Everyone that used to use computers mostly still use desktops in addition to smart phones.
But the vast influx of people that use smart phones as their main system means most don't have full ISP and real connection to the internet. At best they might have an ipv6 address. But an ipv6 and CNAT ipv4 still doesn't allow you to communicate with most peers on the internet even if it does work for most corporate websites.
If ipv6 ever arives then p2p can work. But until that time most mobile devices cannot participate in most of the internet, p2p included. And mobile is where the money is spent.
Is there any decentralized p2p network where it is easy to find content nowadays?