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0 pointsboomlinde1y ago0 comments

Perhaps torrents?

archive.org does use torrents and I have one such torrent laying around in my client, which occasionally connects to peers although the the trackers are currently offline. I suppose a new client would find me and other peers through the DHT. I'd share a magnet link for someone to try, but it's a copyright-ignoring ROM dump archive so it may not be the best idea to post it here.

It's interesting that torrents may not be the first thing that comes to mind. They have the "PR issue" of being the now seemingly mundane way in which we've been downloading DVD rips for the last 20 odd years. Newer technology like IPFS does a better job making the cool core of this technology actually sound cool.

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divbzero1y ago

I didn’t know that archive.org already has torrents. I guess what we would need, on top of that, is a system for assigning those torrents to new peers.

boomlindeOP1y ago

That already exists. Peers find each other through a distributed hash table which can be bootstrapped from a variety of sources.

I would say the problem is discoverability and actual deployment.

For suddenly popular files it can be a way to donate bandwidth most of all, because then there might suddenly be a lot of peers. For the vast majority of files however, there won't be any other peers and they have to be web seeded by Archive.org either way.

Then there's the discoverability problem. Ultimately you need something like a magnet link to connect to a swarm.

anacrolix1y ago

https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink

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