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I had been working on this successfully for a couple years in the past before I got tired of it and moved on. I still think it's a magnificent idea, to be able

I had been working on this successfully for a couple years in the past before I got tired of it and moved on. I still think it's a magnificent idea, to be able to host your own torrent site and to decentralise the last centralised bit of BitTorrent. https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico

hardwaresofton 4y ago
Thanks for writing that note on the repository -- it was thoughtful and well explained -- reading through your small manifesto that was linked and that's fun too.
- kevinwang 4y ago
  I think the manifesto was Aaron Swartz's
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    oh you're right I didn't even notice -- aaronsw.com... First time I've read it.
rakoo 4y ago
I've built a small cli utility to search the database: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/magneticos/ https://sr.ht/~rakoo/magneticos/. It also asks the DHT and known trackers for the liveness of the swarms, so I can sort by seeders. It's simpler and more useful than running a full webserver with ports and all when I only need an ssh access. It has served me well and will be more than enough for a long time
thomastjeffery 4y ago
The main thing that seems to be missing, in my experience, is moderation. If someone can manage to make a decentralized forum-like moderation list, then we wouldn't have any use for centralized trackers anymore. I think it could probably be done by using public GPG keys as identities, then keeping changes in a torrent-distributed git repo where user-generated data is saved in GPG signed git commits. Then the only centralization left would be what branch/torrent people introduce to new users.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  > I think it could probably be done by using public GPG keys as identities, then keeping changes in a torrent-distributed git repo where user-generated data is saved in GPG signed git commits. Congratulations, you won some HN bingo squares by introducing both PKI and blockchain to the discussion :-D But, in all seriousness: moderation against what?
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    Yes, moderation is as simple as not downloading something you object to. As for identifying false metadata, that falls outside of moderation.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    Not against. For. For curation. For categorization and deduplication. And for trust. You can only express so much with titles and seed/leech counts. Trackers that were known to be the best - like What.CD and waffles.fm - were private and heavily moderated. You had to be invited, usually by passing a quick interview to prove you knew how to avoid common data management pitfalls like transcoding from a lossy codec. That made those trackers into carefully curated collections of high quality content. Even public trackers benefit from some moderation. Most people only want to be browsing porn intentionally, so having a category for it let's you browse for movies or whatever. It's all about sorting the noise into signal. It's also helpful to have some commentary on a torrent. Maybe the subtitles are forced. Maybe the software has a virus or includes adware, but ended up getting a critical mass of seeds/leeches anyway. Maybe there is some similar content worth talking about. Have you ever used a public decentralized platform that wasn't full of trolls? I haven't.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  >> then we wouldn't have any use for centralized trackers anymore. So we finally invented emule? Centralized servers that provide selection, moderation, quality control, information, imdb score etc, is exactly why bittorrent protocol won against all the decentralised protocols.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Thanks for writing that note on the repository -- it was thoughtful and well explained -- reading through your small manifesto that was linked and that's fun too.

kevinwang 4y ago
I think the manifesto was Aaron Swartz's
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  oh you're right I didn't even notice -- aaronsw.com... First time I've read it.

rakoo 4y ago

I've built a small cli utility to search the database: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/magneticos/ https://sr.ht/~rakoo/magneticos/. It also asks the DHT and known trackers for the liveness of the swarms, so I can sort by seeders. It's simpler and more useful than running a full webserver with ports and all when I only need an ssh access. It has served me well and will be more than enough for a long time

thomastjeffery 4y ago

The main thing that seems to be missing, in my experience, is moderation. If someone can manage to make a decentralized forum-like moderation list, then we wouldn't have any use for centralized trackers anymore. I think it could probably be done by using public GPG keys as identities, then keeping changes in a torrent-distributed git repo where user-generated data is saved in GPG signed git commits. Then the only centralization left would be what branch/torrent people introduce to new users.

mdaniel 4y ago
> I think it could probably be done by using public GPG keys as identities, then keeping changes in a torrent-distributed git repo where user-generated data is saved in GPG signed git commits. Congratulations, you won some HN bingo squares by introducing both PKI and blockchain to the discussion :-D But, in all seriousness: moderation against what?
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  Yes, moderation is as simple as not downloading something you object to. As for identifying false metadata, that falls outside of moderation.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Not against. For. For curation. For categorization and deduplication. And for trust. You can only express so much with titles and seed/leech counts. Trackers that were known to be the best - like What.CD and waffles.fm - were private and heavily moderated. You had to be invited, usually by passing a quick interview to prove you knew how to avoid common data management pitfalls like transcoding from a lossy codec. That made those trackers into carefully curated collections of high quality content. Even public trackers benefit from some moderation. Most people only want to be browsing porn intentionally, so having a category for it let's you browse for movies or whatever. It's all about sorting the noise into signal. It's also helpful to have some commentary on a torrent. Maybe the subtitles are forced. Maybe the software has a virus or includes adware, but ended up getting a critical mass of seeds/leeches anyway. Maybe there is some similar content worth talking about. Have you ever used a public decentralized platform that wasn't full of trolls? I haven't.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
>> then we wouldn't have any use for centralized trackers anymore. So we finally invented emule? Centralized servers that provide selection, moderation, quality control, information, imdb score etc, is exactly why bittorrent protocol won against all the decentralised protocols.