Comment by CodesInChaos
6 hours ago
In my experience public torrents often die as they grow older. It doesn't help that BitTorrent V1 makes long term seeding annoying, and BitTorrent V2 is almost never used.
6 hours ago
In my experience public torrents often die as they grow older. It doesn't help that BitTorrent V1 makes long term seeding annoying, and BitTorrent V2 is almost never used.
I never understood this, is there anything that makes it difficult for the original uploader, the one that supposedly offers the file directly, to offer a torrent instead for the same amount of time?
As far as perennity is concerned it seems strictly better.
Every change to the source is effectively a new torrent. This creates a ton of fragmentation as data is reorganized, remixed, reencoded, and so on.
You can see this with many Linux distros: there is no single Debian torrent that people seed for years because there's always a refreshed version.
Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.
IPFS has a solution [0] to this problem
[0] https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipns/ipns-record/
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You can trivially have storage deduplication for the files served via torrent, transparent to the protocol. The most trivial version of this that you can do today with pretty much any client is having a single directory containing files serving multiple overlapping torrents.
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> Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.
This is true for any distribution method not just p2p. You can even download a nightly through torrents so what does it matter how the data is transferred if it’s always going to require `apt update`?
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but model releases are already non-changeable?
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If they're no longer using that model they may not be willing to continue using their storage for it.
yes, but a few dedicated hoarders could keep many models alive, and I'm fairly certain the local LLM community has plenty of people who would.
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How does this address the previous point? If they are not providing storage, then centralized or decentralized doesn’t make a difference.
Torrent/P2P can only add redundancy, so it’s impossible to have worse availability than a download link?
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You can add an existing HTTP download as a "web seed" to a torrent, so they don't actually need to do anything for people to share it as a torrent.
Yeah but that's what provider like huggingface could just do, keep seeding the models so they are still accessible
The biggest problem with BTv1 was the lack of per-file checksumming, and swarm merging (i.e. individual files have shared seeding pools across torrents). BTv2 specs the latter, but I think only BiglyBT actually implements it. Having both of those features from the get-go would've gone a LONG way to fixing the dead torrent problem.
You only need one person/organization to commit to seeding. The majority of people do not want to seed at all without some sort of incentive.
If this site represents a coordinated datahoarding effort then there will be at least a few people who will seed indefinitely.
The last guy (kimdotcom) who was working on this (incentive for seeding) seems to be heading to the US: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/651123/cou...
It’s interesting he’s no longer getting any media attention any more.
A torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.
I always wondered why v2 is never used... you can even search for files by their individual hash with it.
Because history is path-dependent, as engineers keep learning over and over again. It doesn't matter whether Plan9 is theoretically superior to Linux - we're all on Linux and nobody's porting all the apps over.