Is BitTorrent still relevant in the Modern Era? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 5 days ago by Mavrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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!

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[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 14 points 5 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.

[-] ivn@jlai.lu 17 points 5 days ago

I don't see what you can do at the protocol level to improve availability, you still need people storing the file and acting as peers. Some trackers try to improve that by incentivizing long term seeding.

[-] WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 5 days ago

It’s called private trackers, and they are great.

[-] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 5 days ago

Meh.. I get itchy when I hear private. We could also improve the experience for seeding publicly and for longer. Not only by education but maybe even using some kind of intensive to keep seeding.

[-] WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 days ago

The issue is that public trackers are too easy for people to monitor and pursue copyright infringement claims for. Private trackers, by design, are much harder to do that with, which makes them leaps and bounds safer to use.

Don’t think about it as keeping the common man out, it is about keeping The Man out.