Is there anything torrent-like, decentralized way of finding new stuff ?

I'm sorry this idea is kind of hard to explain. Like if you had a torrent, but every week or so you'd have new interesting stuff to discover from it ?

LIke a "torrent channel" but fully decentralized somehow ?

Maybe you'd just get more torrents to choose from. Large, searchable torrent archives, "this week's new torrents" ?

What about receiving news video, streams without a website to coordinate it, no gatekeeper except the digital signature of the strangers you trust ?

Like, why isn't facebook a torrent network ? Why isn't youtube, just torrents ? Facebook and youtube without having to ask Zuck and Goog for permission ?

32 comments

Decentralized TV?
- I'd watch that, actually, fully automatic decentralized, swarm amplified video streams.
  
  Reminds me of pirate radio or whatever that type of thing was called in english. It would be really nice tbh
It's called 'having friends'. I'm told; canmot confirm.
- I have never heard of these so-called "friends" and remain on the lookout for an actual technological solution to this problem.
  
  Same. Just something i heard.
- I will second this.
  I’ve found the only real way to find good media to watch is to talk to others with similar interests and ideas and they generally have good recommendations.
It sounds like you're describing federated software like Lemmy, and tracker RSS feeds.
- Those still need some webserver running, at a specific place and a specific ICANN acredited registrar, subject to centralized control, shutdown, censorship, with it's shadowy, unaccountable invisible gatekeepers and traceable, definitive owners in ways that torrent swarms just aren't.
  Is there nothing that puts everything in the swarm ? Posts that aren't in "one place". Distribution channels with no choke points.
  The thing with a .torrent file is that it will never have anything new in it. Nobody is going to post a comment inside of it. It's not going to hold a discussion and point to you new or newer things like it.
  I'm grasping at something that doesn't exist yet and doesn't have a mind, but I think it should it exist, it should already exist, somehow but it doesn't !?
  
  There was a peer 2 peer reddit clone I used 5 years ago. It was a standalone app for linux. I forgot what it was called. It was pretty dead back then though, less than one post per day.
  edit: i found it https://getaether.net/
  
  Let's say there is no master server. How do peers find each other?
Run a DHT crawler? It can be a bit resource intensive (I ran magnetico for a while) and it'll take a while for it to index enough old stuff for the new discoveries to be actually new, but you'd get a fully decentralized continuous feed of newly discovered torrents that doesn't depend on any centralized infrastructure, just the decentralized bittorrent DHT swarm.
To get a picture of what it looks like, you can check out btdig, it's the same thing so if you click on "recent findings" at the bottom you'll see what a recently found feed of DHT looks like.
- Thanks that's very interesting ! I wonder what else could happen on this dht network, is it possible to send messages, respond ? Create lists of magnet links and post them ?
retrovibed has a prototype of the DHT crawler buitlin, along with a userspace vpn and media player if you're looking for public content. echoing what others said it can be somewhat resource intensive. its alpha software, but if you're interested in trying it out ping me.
Jellyseer will kinda do that. But only for tv/movies in your jellyfin library.
- Was going to suggest Jellyseerr as well. It works for movies and TV and not just in your library. It will suggest what's popular and recommendations. Also useful if a movie is part of a collection.
Are you specifically interested in a distributed P2P social network? Maybe Scuttlebutt?
- Thanks I'm checking this out, never heard of that before !
  
  Just a word of warning, I don't know how much it's actually used today. I think it had some scaling issues in practice.
Only thing I used matching your needs was an RSS feed coming from a private tracker I'm on. I'm sure there are rss feeds for public trackers too. I self-hosted an rss reader and aggregator, and I could specify which torrent categories I would get notified about.
I used RetroShare for that a decade ago, but you need to find contacts for that.
Maybe a briar or simplex group?
Just search for keywords in p2p filesharing networks?
- Yeah I found some, heavily gated, not swarm based, like gnutella and direct connect. It's somehow "not it" but napster descendants.
  
  Heavily gated? What's heavily gated about Gnutella?
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file-sharing_applications
This is how private torrent sites work, ime. Rotating featured torrents and forums for conversation.
- That minus the private, minus all the baggage a "traditionnal centralized forum" would bring, and entirely swarm based, no ICANN domain name, no web servers, no dedicated VPS running the show. I'm specifically not talking of a "forum and tracker" combo.

32 comments