I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts.
I'll give Bitmagnet a try for an Indexer.
I did find that IPFS, with a pinning service (I won't shill the one I used in particular), was a bit easier and just worked for everyone who tried to use it.
But I'd like to get my bittorrent presence up to the "just works" level also.
https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/06/how-to-add-web-seeds-to-t...
This seems exciting. Have you done it successfully?
I like your idea of giving its name back to a technology that just works better, and I think it pairs really well with giving back a humane touch to how we use the internet, computers, and putting people back at the center rather than thinking about tools first !
What a DHT crawler like Bitmagnet does is the following:
1. Take a few initial "bootstrap" torrents and ping them to see which IP addresses are seeding that file 2. Ping those IP addresses and ask what other files/torrents they're seeding 3. Ping those torrents to see which IP addresses are seeding that torrent
Rinse repeat.
So to distribute your music to fans, you'd just want to put magnet links to your music on your site.
Writing a DHT crawler is super fun, I suggest everyone to get a cheap VM and write/run one.
How many cups of coffee does it take to internalize hamming distance? :-)
This is not correct.
> Bittorrent's DHT is not a network independent of torrent swarms.
This is also wrong. People have used the DHT for non-torrent-related purposes.
> You need the address of a peer who is already part of the network in order to join it, and you have to get a list those addresses from somewhere.
And nothing dictates that that has to be obtained via the bittorrent peer protocol. https://stackoverflow.com/a/11089702/1362755
> People have used the DHT for non-torrent-related purposes.
This is simply non-responsive. People have used a DHT overlaid on the collection of torrent swarms for non-torrent related purposes.
> And nothing dictates that that has to be obtained via the bittorrent peer protocol.
This is a silly distinction. You also don't need to join a swarm to get on the DHT if I join a swarm to get on the DHT, write down the addresses I get on a piece of paper, then email you those addresses, which you plug into your handwritten specialized client that only knows how to join the DHT.
The "find bootstrap nodes via a bunch of DNS records, then persist long-lived contacts locally" approach is quite common.
> People have used a DHT overlaid on the collection of torrent swarms for non-torrent related purposes.
No, the software does not involve joining any bittorrent swarms at all.
Out of curiosity, why not just distribute via R2 or similar, or archive.org if you don't need AuthN/AuthZ? What's the complexity (to you and listeners) of BitTorrent buy you?
But I'd like to put forward a practice that demonstrates that the tools that have been smeared as anti-artist (chiefly but not only bittorrent) are actually compelling tools for independent distribution.