Here's another #FEP for representing torrents on activitypub :)
short, sweet, and with a reference implementation and tests!
towards a federated bittorrent tracker with #sciop !
PR: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/714
Discussion: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d8c8-bittorrent-torrent-objects/8309 (or this thread)
#FEP_d8c8 #BitTorrentOverActivityPub #FederatedP2P #BitTorrent
@jonny Interesting!
@cwebber people used to laugh when i said the phrase "federated p2p" but by god we'll make it real.
torrents are just bundles of hashes and a file layout! they (or v2 torrents at least) are actually a really nice way to do content addressing for files and directories. so when combined with the rest of activitypub, e.g. being able to do updates, sign objects, extend them with additional vocabularies, then you get something very interesting indeed....
this FEP is trying to be as minimal as possible: just get a representation of an object. but follow-up FEP wills spec out handling other parts of the protocol, e.g. BEP 0039 style updating using object integrity proofs. so tentatively butterfly memeing "is this mutable torrents"
what if a torrent contains self-authenticating signed activitypub objects???? what if we could jump back and forth between federation and p2p?
@jonny why am I a billion times more excited about this than IPFS?
(Why are a project’s ✨vibes✨ such a reliable indicator of whether or not it will be taken over by dipshits?)
@mycorrhiza idk, as someone who was very excited for the idea of IPFS but continually let down by the reality of IPFS, i find myself increasingly not interested in "big world" things where everything is in a soup of everything and more interested in "many small worlds" things where lots of small things can link up or be independent, their choice.
@jonny woah this is amazing!
@liaizon torrents were basically JSON all along!
@OliverUv @liaizon well good news is that this should be fully invertible to bencoding, and if you like bencoding more than JSON then there is provision made for that: JSON Torrent objects can link to their bencoded form, and also have an abbreviated form that just consists of infohashes, magnet links, and a link to the bencoded copy. Having bencoded<->json representations gets us the ability to use activitypub on top of bittorrent.
