Comment by monsieurbanana
7 hours ago
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/
Most of IPFS doesn't actually work very well, if you've ever tried to use it
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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.
> files serving multiple overlapping torrents
This sounds wildly complex, especially from a discovery perspective.
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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`?
Yeah, I just use the "netinstaller" ISOs since it's much smaller and never needs to be updated. If I had a need for air-gapped/offline installs I'd either download a larger ISO or just manually install packages from .deb as needed.
but model releases are already non-changeable?
Yes, models are a good use for P2P especially if everyone agrees to share the same torrent and someone (or a cohort) commit to seeding for the long haul.
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.
They don't. That's the conversation topic.
Nor do they need to. 99% of everything is crap, and not worth prescribing except for a random sample so future historians can study our crap.
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.