At 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 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
Innovation in this sector doesn't mean nicer fonts, there are real avenues for meaningful change that actually improve users' life
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.
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.
There actually are BEPs to manage cross swarms sharing, but I don't know of clients that do handle that. BEPv2 should make this easier though, because each file has their own hashes on top of the top-level hash.
> 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.
I've been using decentralized indexing for more than a year and I haven't needed to go back to ad- and malware-ridden search sites. I find the number of seeders a good enough indicator of quality, but of course that only works for popular content.
EDIT: thanks for formatting, I always forget this double linefeed rule
Do you actually use torrents day to day? I have a strong suspicion that nowadays most people in developed economies who might be interested in TUIs use private trackers, as they're much safer and usually much better curated. However, that means that a) ratios are usually enforced, you have to keep seeding b) DHT and PEX are disabled and explicitly forbidden. Which in turn means the features you are describing are anti-features, especially considering the rise to *rrr-family of tools aggregating centralised private trackers, and relative unpopularity of DHT for discovery. Without curation and entry barriers open systems like DHT are only going to get spammed and/or get the swarm members DMCAed by RIAA and friends.
I do use torrents daily, and I don't use private trackers because I subscribe to the idea of shared content available to everyone if the cost is nil. There definitively is spam, but it's not kazaa- or emule-level of spams: it's easy to find correct content as soon as it's not too obscure. With a fast enough connection, you can have a >1 ratio in a matter of hours at most, so your visibility is not very long. YMMV, of course.
I don't think seeding for hours is conductive to long term retention. For context, in private tracker land it's normal to seed an obscure arthouse movie for years, being an only seeder and getting it downloaded maybe five times. Which reminds me that the cost is not really nil, as you have to pay those electricity bills and depreciation to keep it available. Curation is not free either.
I have lost hope that public torrents can serve as a good availability system. The issues are not technical but "societal", ie what rules do we collectively follow, to make content available. Private trackers are perfect for this specifically because they have a way to nudge people into re-sharing poorly seeded torrents. Bittorrent helps do that, but any technology can.
> being an only seeder and getting it downloaded maybe five times
I haven't seen/conducted a thorough study, but I believe that a ratio of 5 helps content be alive for a longer duration, even if imperfect, taking into account 1 or 2 or those 5 that will disconnect and stop sharing. Everyone should target this ratio. That's why I'm ok seeding for hours as long as I hit that number, but for more obscure content I might be seeding it forever
> Which reminds me that the cost is not really nil
True, nothing is really ever nil. What I meant to say is that the cost of distribution is nothing compared to the cost of production.
For what it's worth, I mostly avoid using software that mandates or doesn't work as expected without nerd fonts. I find nerd fonts unnecessary but maybe it's just me.
The custom font adds a number of glyphs which wouldn't otherwise be accessible. Specifically for the folder icon [1] and I'd have thought for the borders as well.
Nerd Font is pretty cool, I'd give it a go - I don't know how terminals gracefully fallback if the glyphs don't exist.
If memory serves this was one of the things that bit youtube-dl in the ass with github: the documentation described/demonstrated using it to violate copyright.
Not in their documentation. Two or three of the many videos used in their unit tests were music videos, and wouldn't have been used if youtube didn't serve them differently.
it's not technically required to function properly, just listed as a prerequisite since several glyphs require a nerd font :) you can go ahead and think of it as optional if you'd like.
I hope this is a good place to ask: what do people in HN use for torrent client?
I recently learned that transmission got hacked (more than once apparently) so I decided to stop using it. The alternatives seem to be deluge or qbittorrent. I picked the latter because it has labels (and supports moving finished downloads to different folders depending on label), which is a feature I'd always wanted in a torrent client. But my point is it seems to me all the torrent clients seems very similar, barring very minor features.
I personally use qbittorrent, after ubittorrent got ads way back. I view torrent clients like a good saw/hammer, if it works and you know it well, that's all you need.
Sometimes you don't need to put much thought into what software you pick.
Is there any state of union like link for torrent and other related protocols as mentioned? A bit outdated. And torrent site is not very reliable to get info.
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.
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.
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.
Shouldn't the casual anarchist in you rejoice at people hitting back on predatory, monopolistic, customer-hostile business practices of Big Movie though?
I occasionally use a torrent to simply move large files to a slow endpoint (essentially a 1:1 connection), so I don't have to keep the session alive for the whole file move. I know there are probably other, better, solutions for that, but it works for me.
- 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
Innovation in this sector doesn't mean nicer fonts, there are real avenues for meaningful change that actually improve users' life