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In my experience public torrents often die as they grow older. It doesn't help that BitTorrent V1 makes long term seeding annoying, and BitTorrent V2 is almost

In my experience public torrents often die as they grow older. It doesn't help that BitTorrent V1 makes long term seeding annoying, and BitTorrent V2 is almost never used.

monsieurbanana 7d ago
I never understood this, is there anything that makes it difficult for the original uploader, the one that supposedly offers the file directly, to offer a torrent instead for the same amount of time? As far as perennity is concerned it seems strictly better.
- cube00 7d ago
  If they're no longer using that model they may not be willing to continue using their storage for it.
  - csomar 7d ago
    How does this address the previous point? If they are not providing storage, then centralized or decentralized doesn’t make a difference. Torrent/P2P can only add redundancy, so it’s impossible to have worse availability than a download link?
    - _blk 7d ago
      [flagged]
      - pell 7d ago
        > Is there a fully in-browser torrent option that has the same UX as a regular file download in Firefox? Opera did back in the day.
      - Wowfunhappy 7d ago
        Well, for a torrent to stay healthy, users have to seed after download, so it can't possibly have the same UX as a standard browser file download unless you want to either kill the ecosystem or hide from the user what is consuming upload bandwidth. That said, for large files, I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable.
        QuantumNomad_ 7d ago
        > I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable. Brave browser had BitTorrent client built in for a while. I tried it a couple of times as I already use Brave for web browsing on my laptop. It was a very confusing BitTorrent client. I struggled to use it, and wasted time waiting for a download to complete only to not be able to find where the files were and then they disappeared. Using a decent BitTorrent client like you say is much preferable to the one that they had in Brave browser.
  - vlyan 7d ago
    yes, but a few dedicated hoarders could keep many models alive, and I'm fairly certain the local LLM community has plenty of people who would.
    - mitxela 7d ago
      They don't. That's the conversation topic. Nor do they need to. 99% of everything is crap, and not worth prescribing except for a random sample so future historians can study our crap.
- zenoprax 7d ago
  Every change to the source is effectively a new torrent. This creates a ton of fragmentation as data is reorganized, remixed, reencoded, and so on. You can see this with many Linux distros: there is no single Debian torrent that people seed for years because there's always a refreshed version. Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.
  - righthand 7d ago
    > Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages. This is true for any distribution method not just p2p. You can even download a nightly through torrents so what does it matter how the data is transferred if it’s always going to require `apt update`?
    - zenoprax 7d ago
      Yeah, I just use the "netinstaller" ISOs since it's much smaller and never needs to be updated. If I had a need for air-gapped/offline installs I'd either download a larger ISO or just manually install packages from .deb as needed.
  - chmod775 7d ago
    You can trivially have storage deduplication for the files served via torrent, transparent to the protocol. The most trivial version of this that you can do today with pretty much any client is having a single directory containing files serving multiple overlapping torrents.
    - skeledrew 7d ago
      > files serving multiple overlapping torrents This sounds wildly complex, especially from a discovery perspective.
      - chmod775 7d ago
        I don't see why it would be. It's transparent to other clients just like it is to the protocol. It cannot be more complex than alternatives by construction.
- debugnik 7d ago
  You can add an existing HTTP download as a "web seed" to a torrent, so they don't actually need to do anything for people to share it as a torrent.
- deleted 7d ago
  [deleted]
zenoprax 7d ago
You only need one person/organization to commit to seeding. The majority of people do not want to seed at all without some sort of incentive. If this site represents a coordinated datahoarding effort then there will be at least a few people who will seed indefinitely.
- csomar 7d ago
  The last guy (kimdotcom) who was working on this (incentive for seeding) seems to be heading to the US: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/651123/court-of-appeal-dismisses-kim-dotcom-challenge-to-us-extradition https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/651123/cou... It’s interesting he’s no longer getting any media attention any more.
ranger_danger 7d ago
I always wondered why v2 is never used... you can even search for files by their individual hash with it.
- mitxela 7d ago
  Because history is path-dependent, as engineers keep learning over and over again. It doesn't matter whether Plan9 is theoretically superior to Linux - we're all on Linux and nobody's porting all the apps over.
bilegeek 7d ago
The biggest problem with BTv1 was the lack of per-file checksumming, and swarm merging (i.e. individual files have shared seeding pools across torrents). BTv2 specs the latter, but I think only BiglyBT actually implements it. Having both of those features from the get-go would've gone a LONG way to fixing the dead torrent problem.
- deleted 7d ago
  [deleted]
Retr0id 7d ago
A torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.
PunchyHamster 7d ago
Yeah but that's what provider like huggingface could just do, keep seeding the models so they are still accessible

In my experience public torrents often die as they grow older. It doesn't help that BitTorrent V1 makes long term seeding annoying, and BitTorrent V2 is almost never used.

monsieurbanana 7d ago

I never understood this, is there anything that makes it difficult for the original uploader, the one that supposedly offers the file directly, to offer a torrent instead for the same amount of time? As far as perennity is concerned it seems strictly better.

cube00 7d ago
If they're no longer using that model they may not be willing to continue using their storage for it.
- csomar 7d ago
  How does this address the previous point? If they are not providing storage, then centralized or decentralized doesn’t make a difference. Torrent/P2P can only add redundancy, so it’s impossible to have worse availability than a download link?
  - _blk 7d ago
    [flagged]
    - pell 7d ago
      > Is there a fully in-browser torrent option that has the same UX as a regular file download in Firefox? Opera did back in the day.
    - Wowfunhappy 7d ago
      Well, for a torrent to stay healthy, users have to seed after download, so it can't possibly have the same UX as a standard browser file download unless you want to either kill the ecosystem or hide from the user what is consuming upload bandwidth. That said, for large files, I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable.
      - QuantumNomad_ 7d ago
        > I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable. Brave browser had BitTorrent client built in for a while. I tried it a couple of times as I already use Brave for web browsing on my laptop. It was a very confusing BitTorrent client. I struggled to use it, and wasted time waiting for a download to complete only to not be able to find where the files were and then they disappeared. Using a decent BitTorrent client like you say is much preferable to the one that they had in Brave browser.
- vlyan 7d ago
  yes, but a few dedicated hoarders could keep many models alive, and I'm fairly certain the local LLM community has plenty of people who would.
  - mitxela 7d ago
    They don't. That's the conversation topic. Nor do they need to. 99% of everything is crap, and not worth prescribing except for a random sample so future historians can study our crap.
zenoprax 7d ago
Every change to the source is effectively a new torrent. This creates a ton of fragmentation as data is reorganized, remixed, reencoded, and so on. You can see this with many Linux distros: there is no single Debian torrent that people seed for years because there's always a refreshed version. Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.
- righthand 7d ago
  > Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages. This is true for any distribution method not just p2p. You can even download a nightly through torrents so what does it matter how the data is transferred if it’s always going to require `apt update`?
  - zenoprax 7d ago
    Yeah, I just use the "netinstaller" ISOs since it's much smaller and never needs to be updated. If I had a need for air-gapped/offline installs I'd either download a larger ISO or just manually install packages from .deb as needed.
- chmod775 7d ago
  You can trivially have storage deduplication for the files served via torrent, transparent to the protocol. The most trivial version of this that you can do today with pretty much any client is having a single directory containing files serving multiple overlapping torrents.
  - skeledrew 7d ago
    > files serving multiple overlapping torrents This sounds wildly complex, especially from a discovery perspective.
    - chmod775 7d ago
      I don't see why it would be. It's transparent to other clients just like it is to the protocol. It cannot be more complex than alternatives by construction.
debugnik 7d ago
You can add an existing HTTP download as a "web seed" to a torrent, so they don't actually need to do anything for people to share it as a torrent.
deleted 7d ago
[deleted]

zenoprax 7d ago

You only need one person/organization to commit to seeding. The majority of people do not want to seed at all without some sort of incentive. If this site represents a coordinated datahoarding effort then there will be at least a few people who will seed indefinitely.

csomar 7d ago
The last guy (kimdotcom) who was working on this (incentive for seeding) seems to be heading to the US: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/651123/court-of-appeal-dismisses-kim-dotcom-challenge-to-us-extradition https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/651123/cou... It’s interesting he’s no longer getting any media attention any more.

ranger_danger 7d ago

I always wondered why v2 is never used... you can even search for files by their individual hash with it.

mitxela 7d ago
Because history is path-dependent, as engineers keep learning over and over again. It doesn't matter whether Plan9 is theoretically superior to Linux - we're all on Linux and nobody's porting all the apps over.

bilegeek 7d ago

The biggest problem with BTv1 was the lack of per-file checksumming, and swarm merging (i.e. individual files have shared seeding pools across torrents). BTv2 specs the latter, but I think only BiglyBT actually implements it. Having both of those features from the get-go would've gone a LONG way to fixing the dead torrent problem.

deleted 7d ago
[deleted]

Retr0id 7d ago

A torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.

PunchyHamster 7d ago

Yeah but that's what provider like huggingface could just do, keep seeding the models so they are still accessible