The original post: /r/torrents by /u/Witext on 2025-01-09 02:01:37.

I’ve been thinking about an idea for the last couple of days & I think it’s a really cool idea this I wanted to share with some of y’all that perhaps are a bit more knowledgeable in the tech

It solves one gripe I’ve had for a long time & also brings a lot of improvements for the web

Gripe: Images online are often shared, downloaded, uploaded, lossily encoded over & over, the same viral image responsible for terabytes of bandwidth worldwide even tho it’s the same image being shared

Solution: Torrents are distributed & rely on multiple sources to be efficient, reliable & quick, therefore one of the biggest problems is too few seeds & seeds with slow upload speeds

What do forums like reddit where these images are shared have? A lot of servers with high upload speeds.

I think y’all know where I’m going but imagine an image format that behaves like a normal image but essentially contains a magnet link. When a person uploads a new image to let’s say reddit, Reddits servers immediately become seeds for this image. When someone downloads this image, it works like normal at first but they now become a seeder & if they upload the image to another site, that site becomes another seeder for the same image

A big plus is that the image never looses quality since it’s all just the same image instead of thousands of identical ones of varying compression

I would wager a large part of online traffic is uploading & downloading of imagery so this would heavily benefit web companies as well. Since the websites now distribute the image between themselves & downloaders, we also don’t need to use lossy formats & we could use something like png instead of webp or jpeg

You might say a lot more people visit these sites than people who download & become seeders, so the ration of leeching to seeding will be very low overall. But the people who visit the site also download it temporarily to view it in the browser, & with native support from chrome for example, you could have a system where you become a seeder for images you view until you have a ratio of 2 or smth like that

If we work off the BitTorrent protocol, it also has deduplication which means if someone downloads the image & reencodes it so it looses the original link, the hash will be identical so it will still be identified as the same file & contribute to seeding if uploaded