Hacker News Reader

Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

The article says that OpenTrackr is

    a significant and reliable player in the BitTorrent ecosystem

and that it sees

    near daily peaks of 500,000 connections per second

and that it is monetized via Patreon. So I had a look at their Patreon page, curious how much they make. It turns out to be ... $51.63 per month.

Is that what you make these days, when you help millions of people on the internet?

I'm not sure what a "torrent tracker" is though. I would have thought it is a website to find torrents. But Similarweb says the website only sees 50k users per month. So it is probably something different which is not accessed by users but by ... software?

Ah yes. Asking ChatGPT, it says a torrent tracker is kind of an index service. And this service is used by torrent client software. Not by users via a browser.

View on HN

"Tracker" is a bit abused. A tracker just keeps track of peers on a given hash. Websites offering an index aren't the same thing. No-one directly uses the website opentrackr.org, they just put the UDP tracker in their torrents

Everyone can create a .torrent file.

While you create it you can enter one or multiple URLs of trackers that everyone connects to when they open the torrent file. (Or none, there is also a decentral why of doing torrents)

Clients just send a hash to the tracker URL and get a list of urls back with other people who send in a request with the same hash.

The tracker does not care how you share those torrent files. I think it's just a list of hashes and URLs.

This might not be 100% correct, but I hope you better understand it :)

> Is that what you make these days, when you help millions of people on the internet?

Yup. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-... "OpenSSL typically receives about $2,000 in donations a year and has just one employee who works full time on the open source code." (This was in 2014, things have improved there.)

Log4J is run by volunteers. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/17/1042692/log4j-in...

There is a generally recognized funding problem. https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/07/open-source-has-a-fund...

There are multiple things to get confused: indexers and trackers.

Indexers are what people that don't have sonarr/radarr/etc interact with directly - a collection of magnets and/or .torrent files.

Trackers are what download clients interact with, usually magnet/.torrent has multiple trackers included in metadata. All these do is match hash to peers. You technically don't need it with DHT, but they speed up peer discovery by a lot compared to just DHT.

Indexers (really often just a forum) often act as trackers as well, but they don't have to.

Trackers often remove .torrent files and magnets at request, but leave enough information for you, you to create new magnet link and use their tracker for peer discovery.

The first few points you made are really great, this is often confused, but:

> Indexers (really often just a forum) often act as trackers as well, but they don't have to.

Indexers might operate a tracker (and often include their tracker by default in all their torrents/magnet links, but they're still not the same thing.

> Trackers often remove .torrent files and magnets at request, but leave enough information for you, you to create new magnet link and use their tracker for peer discovery.

No, I don't think that's true.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer way of distributing files. Trackers are services that tell your client software who your peers are. Indeed, they are typically only accessed by BT client software, not by a browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com