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Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

It was good design to decouple the transfer protocol from the search protocol, to allow different technologies to be explored, but in practice people ended up relying on the "good enough" solution of using the web for search.

Setting the precedent that media companies can seize domain names and force ISPs to block access to search engines if they don't like some of the search results (while ruining the lives of the people running those search engines) is arguably a high price to pay for this improved search service.

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Yes. For all the P2P distributed praise ITT, torrent as a whole, as it is used in the real world, is very centralized. If the Pirate Bay is shut down, that stuff is gone.

Uploading became a privilege, something that normal average people don't do. Earlier people ripped their own CDs, DVDs, magazine scans, digitized their VHS, recorded shows with their TV card etc. and shared these files. I don't know anybody who has ever created a torrent themselves. Everybody just downloads and seeds the pre-packaged stuff from the centralized sites, much like the walled garden philosophy of app stores.

It's fairly uncontroversial that the success of decentralized protocols can promote - and sometimes, even rely upon - centralized points of engagement.

But your experiences sound like what goes on in the public trackers. It's reasonable that folks who go to Pirate Bay to get their TV shows are not going to be as engaged as those who go to TVV, MS, or MTV. There's also the security risks of letting untrusted users upload files that may get consumed by thousands of people in the first hour.

In private trackers, I have often found that uploading is encouraged, going so far as to provide very detailed guides in their wikis showing how to rip the media, prepare the torrent, and upload it to the tracker. If a better quality version can be uploaded to trump the previous version, that is also encouraged. Learning, quality, and appreciation are cornerstones of the private tracker ecosystem, in my experience.

> earlier people ripped their own CDs, DVDs, magazine scans, digitized their VHS, recorded shows with their TV card etc. and shared these files.

For that, you want Direct Connect [0]. As a one sentence pitch: IRC for file sharing ;)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Connect_(protocol)

Or just share magnet links over IRC….

There's still an XDCC warez scene, too. Most of the servers are hacked computers, though, and some people have ethical issues with that.

There must be 1000 Pirate Bay mirrors. Many of which served malware or scams on their web properties through ad networks, but faithfully reproduced the torrent database. It was centralization in precisely the way your post doesn't suggest: nothing was irrevocably lost but one wished for a trusted source with curated links to content.

Well, no. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, you still have the hashes and the files are invariably somewhere else too. That, and thousands upon thousands of backups of their database made by thousands of different people.

There are reencodes, translations and unofficial batches.

Can it be solved with IPFS-based trackers?

Unfortunately search is something that is extremely efficient when centralized but very inefficient when distributed.

A few years ago I was very interested in IPFS but once I learned about the limitations it was pretty much not suitable for me. If you really insist on using IPFS then your best bet would be to have a central tracker host an IPNS based site and publish its database index as a series of json files. The javascript client will then have to query the index on its own in the browser.

The alternative would be to download the entire database and create a local index. In theory that's not a bad idea but over time your database will grow to several gigabytes. That's not comparable to just going to whatever site exist today and submitting a search term but it could be highly resilient.

The fundamental problem is that untrusted nodes can't provide search services. It's possible that they end up redirecting you to a fake listing. Blockchain style consensus doesn't work for something that requires responses immediately like a search engine.

Also bittorrent trackers are slightly more complicated than just a file store

IPFS has an incentivization problem just like torrents.

The main reward for torrent uploaders is fame, would that translate well in IPFS?

Popularity is usually only relevant for individual files but if you have an entire website hosted on IPFS that is very popular then it is quite likely that some people are pinning it. Last time I used IPFS it just didn't have the necessary user friendliness though. Pinning felt more like an afterthought but this was years ago so they may have changed things.

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