Hello everyone,

I recently came across an article on TorrentFreak about the BitTorrent protocol and found myself wondering if it has remained relevant in today’s digital landscape. Given the rapid advancements in technology, I was curious to know if BitTorrent has been surpassed by a more efficient protocol, or if it continues to hold its ground (like I2P?).

Thank you for your insights!

    • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      19 days ago

      I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents’ peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent’s minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn’t practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.

    • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
      0·
      19 days ago

      A better question is; What would you change in the current Internet/WWW to make it as decentralized as Torrents are?

          • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
            0·
            19 days ago

            Problem with IPFS, is that it’s not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.

            Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-

            Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds… Max… However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes…

            • pedroapero@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              These IPFS issues are basically UI-related. You wouldn’t expect a torrent to start within 2 seconds. You wouldn’t expect your torrent to be shared autonomously either. Technically, sharing IPFS hashes along with release names (similar to the crc32 on pre databases) would be very efficient, if only it was popular with a proper UI and indexing tooling. These hashes could even be signed by scene groups in the nfo.