jonny (good kind)
@jonny@neuromatch.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

I'm so unbelievably thrilled to see a new generation of people picking up the mantle of torrenting in the pursuit of preserving the basic information of our culture. People who have never scraped a site or packed a dataset picking up wget and a torrent client and going like "that's it? I can do that."

That's what actually empowering technologies do - show people they are already powerful, that there is no priesthood that they aren't already in. Bittorrent is an empowering technology.

edit: realized i don't think i've actually posted about what we're doing here, i'm talking about sciop and @SafeguardingResearch - https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/114289656473282421
jonny (good kind)
@jonny@neuromatch.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

You don't need anyone's permission to do it. If something matters to you, you can make a copy and make it available to everyone. The only thing that trackers do is tell other people who care about the same thing that you've done so, but you can just as easily make a torrent file and email it to your friends. There is no global network needed, swarms can be as small as 2 computers on an island or as large as the internet. Bittorrent needs a ton of evolution, but it strikes the fundamentally correct balance of complexity and division of labor that other more sophisticated p2p projects that rely on e.g a DHT (rather than just being able to make use of one) or have no organic facilitation of curation and organization like trackers struggle to match.
jonny (good kind)
@jonny@neuromatch.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
quoting myself, bittorrent is like the Hegel of #P2P, it is the simplest protocol i am aware of that is quite literally just the core of the idea as a spec and then decades of history, culture, and practice crusted on top of it. hashes of chunks of data overlaid on top of the data itself to facilitate sharing it. that's it. i am a peer. i have heard of some data via its hash. i ask around for that data. i get it and check it against the hash. end of algorithm. Yes yes, choking algorithms, trackers, transport protocols, holepunching, but that's implementation details.

You can't think about P2P without taking some implicit or explicit disposition towards bittorrent because it's such a pure expression of the idea. An analogous argument is that you can't really implement a P2P protocol without accidentally making it in some way (maybe through a few steps) compatible with bittorrent. v2 makes that bar almost zero by just being literally a set of per-file merkle trees. you can just ignore the .torrent file entirely and deal with the trees directly, all you need to do is understand when someone asks for hashes at a specific level of the tree.

If i was designing a P2P protocol, which i always am in some part of my being, I would start from bittorrent v2 and branch out from there. Being able to talk to a bittorrent client is so trivial it's almost an afterthought, an afternoon of writing udp packing and unpacking functions. If you ignore the rest of the lessons like the obvious UX affordance of having a thing to trade around like .torrent files, magnet links which are an identifier and a non-definitive starting point for resolving it, trackers which are a means of coordinating the swarm, you're just throwing away an entire generation of practical experience
jonny (good kind)
@jonny@neuromatch.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

like Hegel, are there some ways that are certainly worth breaking from the idea, and even the very framing of the idea. But you can't escape needing to take some disposition towards it. This isn't the worship of the past, but understanding why this relic of a protocol still absolutely dominates the culture of person-to-person filesharing, which because it does not have permission from capital to exist is called piracy. This is the still-burning heart of the culture, and its descendants are all some flavor of grim. I am not advocating retvrn to bittorrent, but saying if we don't evolve from its neighborhood and start from empty space then we are throwing away all that lived experience and standing infrastructure. The coolest p2p projects i want to see are mutant bittorrent clients that look nothing like qbittorrent but can still talk to it.