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Torrents have the habit of disappearing when no users keep them alive. It happened to me enough times to be wary of such solution. If there's a way to keep them

Torrents have the habit of disappearing when no users keep them alive. It happened to me enough times to be wary of such solution. If there's a way to keep them alive regardless of interest I'm all for it.

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
How is that worse than serving files via HTTP? With HTTP archive.org is the only peer that can serve files to you, with BitTorrent it will be one of the (hopefully) many peers, and will degrade to the same level of redundancy as HTTP if all other peers leave. BitTorrent also supports web seeds and they don't even really have to keep a full client running, just embed an HTTP link into the .torrent file.
chronogram 3y ago
Have you tried an Archive.org torrent yet? It's backed by the servers, but has the advantages of selecting which parts of the archive you want and being verifiable and being able to have more bandwidth on popular archives. The Archive.org servers show up on the "HTTP sources" tab next to the "Peers" tab for me.
happywolf 3y ago
Seeding peers or machines are meant to mitigate this issue.
nextaccountic 3y ago
The very same machines that serve http can also seed torrents. If those machines go offline, they also take down the http endpoint
shepherdjerred 3y ago
That's no worse than just relying on Arhcive.org to be sole provider
maksimur 3y ago
Thanks everyone for your reply. It made me reconsider my opinion. Though the downvotes are unnecessary. Use them when they're actually necessary. Not as gate keeping or as a "don't agree" button or whatever frivolous thing is passing through your mind.
slim 3y ago
consider seeding the torrents you download
jeroenhd 3y ago
The torrents the archive provides are backed by web seeds served by the internet archive web servers. This approach allows the internet archive to effectively rate limit hosts without making content unavailable entirely, and allows others to help carry the load.
ElongatedMusket 3y ago
See https://webtorrent.io/faq https://webtorrent.io/faq for some ideas of doing what you're wishing
jlokier 3y ago
This is what "proof of storage" or "proof of data availability" blockchain networks are for. They use economic incentives to continuously pay nodes a small amount to store some data and keep it available, and the cryptographic sampling mechanism ensures that less popular data must remain in the available dataset for nodes to be paid, even if it is rarely requested in full.
- remram 3y ago
  If you are willing to spend money, there is no problem keeping content up with existing technology. Like always, blockchain solutions miss the problem entirely.
  - jlokier 3y ago
    It would be nice not to shoot the messenger. The problem described by maksumur is a real problem people encounter often - torrents for less popular large files that people only occasionally want, but do want or need, have a habit of disappearing, or being non-functional when you do find a seed. Popularity plays too strong a role. As far as I know the proof-of-data-availability folks (whether using a blockchain or not) are the only folks trying to solve this problem with a serious technical solution at a cost scale lower than "rent your own server and have deep pockets for bandwidth" at the moment. It's not about "willing to spend money", as if there is only one threshold to pass. Torrents are used largely because they diffuse the cost of hosting, so that people (and organisations) don't need deep pockets to distribute large files to many others. There is an inevitable infrastructure cost but it's spread out more fairly among users. The proof-of-data-availability stuff is similar, but takes it further so that a wider range of data stays publically available to whoever wants to download it, whenever they want, than it otherwise would be. It is really just a more fancy version of torrenting that is less prone to the excessive per-file popularity fluctuations that torrents suffer from. The objective is to lower costs compared with the current state of the internet, not add more. And it does not specifically require a blockchain. If you know of something else tackling the problem I'd be love to hear about it. Torrent seed sites don't qualify, as they don't solve the problem: Most files aren't available on them either, and you have to pay for the more obscure content they do have.
npteljes 3y ago
Torrent needs seeders the same as URLs need their original servers. There's a way to upgrade http to torrent though, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago

How is that worse than serving files via HTTP? With HTTP archive.org is the only peer that can serve files to you, with BitTorrent it will be one of the (hopefully) many peers, and will degrade to the same level of redundancy as HTTP if all other peers leave. BitTorrent also supports web seeds and they don't even really have to keep a full client running, just embed an HTTP link into the .torrent file.

chronogram 3y ago

Have you tried an Archive.org torrent yet? It's backed by the servers, but has the advantages of selecting which parts of the archive you want and being verifiable and being able to have more bandwidth on popular archives. The Archive.org servers show up on the "HTTP sources" tab next to the "Peers" tab for me.

happywolf 3y ago

Seeding peers or machines are meant to mitigate this issue.

nextaccountic 3y ago

The very same machines that serve http can also seed torrents. If those machines go offline, they also take down the http endpoint

shepherdjerred 3y ago

That's no worse than just relying on Arhcive.org to be sole provider

maksimur 3y ago

Thanks everyone for your reply. It made me reconsider my opinion. Though the downvotes are unnecessary. Use them when they're actually necessary. Not as gate keeping or as a "don't agree" button or whatever frivolous thing is passing through your mind.

slim 3y ago

consider seeding the torrents you download

jeroenhd 3y ago

The torrents the archive provides are backed by web seeds served by the internet archive web servers. This approach allows the internet archive to effectively rate limit hosts without making content unavailable entirely, and allows others to help carry the load.

ElongatedMusket 3y ago

See https://webtorrent.io/faq https://webtorrent.io/faq for some ideas of doing what you're wishing

jlokier 3y ago

This is what "proof of storage" or "proof of data availability" blockchain networks are for. They use economic incentives to continuously pay nodes a small amount to store some data and keep it available, and the cryptographic sampling mechanism ensures that less popular data must remain in the available dataset for nodes to be paid, even if it is rarely requested in full.

remram 3y ago
If you are willing to spend money, there is no problem keeping content up with existing technology. Like always, blockchain solutions miss the problem entirely.
- jlokier 3y ago
  It would be nice not to shoot the messenger. The problem described by maksumur is a real problem people encounter often - torrents for less popular large files that people only occasionally want, but do want or need, have a habit of disappearing, or being non-functional when you do find a seed. Popularity plays too strong a role. As far as I know the proof-of-data-availability folks (whether using a blockchain or not) are the only folks trying to solve this problem with a serious technical solution at a cost scale lower than "rent your own server and have deep pockets for bandwidth" at the moment. It's not about "willing to spend money", as if there is only one threshold to pass. Torrents are used largely because they diffuse the cost of hosting, so that people (and organisations) don't need deep pockets to distribute large files to many others. There is an inevitable infrastructure cost but it's spread out more fairly among users. The proof-of-data-availability stuff is similar, but takes it further so that a wider range of data stays publically available to whoever wants to download it, whenever they want, than it otherwise would be. It is really just a more fancy version of torrenting that is less prone to the excessive per-file popularity fluctuations that torrents suffer from. The objective is to lower costs compared with the current state of the internet, not add more. And it does not specifically require a blockchain. If you know of something else tackling the problem I'd be love to hear about it. Torrent seed sites don't qualify, as they don't solve the problem: Most files aren't available on them either, and you have to pay for the more obscure content they do have.

npteljes 3y ago

Torrent needs seeders the same as URLs need their original servers. There's a way to upgrade http to torrent though, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding