How to run a shadow library: operations at Anna’s Archive

I was daydreaming recently after revamping and dialing in my home media server really well (Plex plus all of the *Arr services plus torrents automatically downloading shows and hosting a large movie library)…

Shouldn’t it be possible to create a “virtual media library” that is actually BitTorrent under the hood, powered by people either contributing storage space or content or both, where no one ever hosts any in-tact media and it’s all encrypted enough where each storage provider is basically hosting useless shards of content, and then some client side software can put it all together on demand and serve it up to apps like Plex in a way Plex doesn’t even know it’s not a local file? Assuming everyone has decent bandwidth and there’s enough contributed storage for redundancy to power the torrent network, you could basically have an unlimited and resilient media library…

There’s probably a way to craft an incentive scheme in there for both content submitters and storage providers, probably a decent use case for crypto honestly so it’s all decentralized.

At this point, it seems like content capture and uploading to the torrent world is basically “solved”, and now it’s all about ensuring the network and storage health is there to preserve everything in perpetuity. There’s so many redundant torrents out there, should be possible to merge it all in a giant media library mesh network right?

Is there any way for others to pay for your Cloudflare bills so you could use eg the Business plan? Unclear if that would expose the payer to legal pain but there are probably ways to do it.

There are a few places where the post says things like “had some problems” or “don’t love it”. I would love to know exactly what issues they hit.

What a fascinating post, thanks for sharing. It's great to get a look behind the curtain!