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by CodesInChaos6 hours ago |
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upvoteby monsieurbanana5 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby zenoprax5 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby vova_hn23 hours ago|
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IPFS has a solution [0] to this problem

[0] https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipns/ipns-record/

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upvoteby mitxela3 hours ago|
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Most of IPFS doesn't actually work very well, if you've ever tried to use it
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upvoteby vova_hn23 hours ago|
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> if you've ever tried to use it

Heh, you got me :) IPFS is one of those things that I love reading and about and thinking about using someday, but somehow never get around to it.

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upvoteby mitxela3 hours ago|
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The problems begin with taking 5-10 minutes to locate a file on the network. That's right, when you ask for a file it takes 5-10 minutes. Also if the file isn't in the network at all then it never terminates.

Nobody noticed because everyone just used the central web gateway that cached every file anyone ever accessed.

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upvoteby chmod7755 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby skeledrew5 hours ago|
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> files serving multiple overlapping torrents

This sounds wildly complex, especially from a discovery perspective.

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upvoteby chmod7755 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby righthand5 hours ago|
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> 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`?

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upvoteby zenoprax2 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby NooneAtAll35 hours ago|
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but model releases are already non-changeable?
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upvoteby zenoprax2 hours ago|
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Yes, models are a good use for P2P especially if everyone agrees to share the same torrent and someone (or a cohort) commit to seeding for the long haul.
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upvoteby cube005 hours ago|
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If they're no longer using that model they may not be willing to continue using their storage for it.
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upvoteby vlyan4 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby mitxela3 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby csomar5 hours ago|
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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?

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upvoteby _blk5 hours ago|
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[flagged]
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upvoteby Wowfunhappy4 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby QuantumNomad_1 hours ago|
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> 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.

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upvoteby pell5 hours ago|
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> 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.

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upvoteby 3 hours ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby debugnik4 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby bilegeek5 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby 2 hours ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby zenoprax5 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby csomar5 hours ago|
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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/cou...

It’s interesting he’s no longer getting any media attention any more.

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upvoteby Retr0id5 hours ago|
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A torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.
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upvoteby ranger_danger5 hours ago|
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I always wondered why v2 is never used... you can even search for files by their individual hash with it.
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upvoteby mitxela5 hours ago|
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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.
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