i2p torrenting general

[cumlord]

i think it's not a bad supplement for public trackers for some things, and there's opportunity for growth with certain crackdowns. Have a feeling port forwarding will continue being an issue, then people look into ways around that. There's some solid alternatives out there, seeing more interest in private trackers.

So pretty broad question, curious what people think can be done to make torrenting in i2p better, especially for new people shopping around

[anikey]

maybe some kind of manually created site that would list available movies/shows/whatevers, and list out torrent links for each of them.
You go to that website, search for the needed thing, and get a list of torrents of different qualities. And if it is a multiple-episode thing and there are torrents per episode, then also list them out neatly organized.
It could even be a wiki for people to contribute collaboratively. (or even better, a federated wiki (kinda like irc), so that there are multiple servers serving the same content, owned by different people)

[cumlord]

these are good ideas, i have a half-baked version. maybe more of a quarter-baked version. a more fleshed out site with federation would be great for this sort of thing. i'd never thought about going down the federation route for this

here's some pics in it's current state which aside from the pope icons has been untouched for months:
http://o7jgnp7bubzdn7mxfqmghn3lzsjtpgkb ... /pope.jpeg

http://o7jgnp7bubzdn7mxfqmghn3lzsjtpgkb ... 8/new.jpeg

http://o7jgnp7bubzdn7mxfqmghn3lzsjtpgkb ... isode.jpeg

http://o7jgnp7bubzdn7mxfqmghn3lzsjtpgkb ... eason.jpeg

http://o7jgnp7bubzdn7mxfqmghn3lzsjtpgkb ... /INFO.jpeg

i originally made it to be a separate way to get hashes out in a fully automated way, but it's become an organization thing for myself. I use it to see what needs repacking and it controls the scripts for finding new episodes and making season packs, blah blah.

but to what you were saying, when my compiler scripts are finished doing their thing they shoot out a .csv. compressed the csv isn't very big, and is picked up by this script, which parses out the info from the csv and adds new content.

since the webapp is a separate thing, i think what could be done for federation is the webapp could follow some addresses where updated zipped .csv's could be found, and then unzip and combine the data from multiple "feeds" when parsing. As of now since it's hastily hacked together, it always exports and reads the whole feed. Maybe then have two separate feeds per content, one with everything and one with only new things. There's probably better ways to do this though so let me know, i chose .csv because it was easy, not because it's efficient or any other reason really.

I have a separate torrent CLI toolpack i'll release soon, and i think in the future something like this could be bundled with it. the toolpack could control the webapp and releases made with the toolpack sent to your own "feed," and anyone running the toolpack could then run their own instance.

just ideas though, the toolpack is a thing and nearly ready, but the webapp would need a lot of work, especially hardening it. unless there's something else farther along that could be adapted to this maybe?

[anikey]

I thought of something more like just a mediawiki (like http://wiki.i2p-projekt.i2p/wiki//), where people would put the torrents they find and categorize them

[cumlord]

This isn't a bad idea either since the tools are already in place

My biggest gripe with this would be having to deal with yet another webui to add things

[anikey]

Well mediawiki can be automated too. E.g. i think wikipedia has a bot that automatically replaces various links into Wayback Machine links.

[anikey]

Another thing, not i2p-specific, but general torrenting is that:

once i've switched from streaming sites to torrenting, i've kinda missed the episode-specific comments that people wrote. they were interesting, and sometimes i even happened to learn something when i read the comments.

i wonder if there would be a system for commenting episodes. and also whether this system would be popular enough to attract interesting comments.

[cumlord]

that's true and it's already a thing so could be implemented as is, if that was hosted for that purpose in i2p i'd give it a shot

were talking about dht earlier in #saltr and it's something i did try to do, has been tried before by other people, in my opinion not best idea mainly for the abuse content among other things, but could be a good idea to do some sort of crawler for clearnet sites to check if the hashes exist in i2p or not (zzz's idea)

tracker2's been struggling lately and think having another place to find things wouldn't be the worst thing. i like the idea of whatever platform it is being federated like you said in some way, otherwise it's the same thing with a central point of failure.

the comments yeah, on clearnet sites there's usually a lot of comments and good chunk of them are useful or save you some time. my hacked together thing doesn't have that, i think to add in a federated way might need to see what they're doing in the fediverse, not really sure how it's done. or maybe there's something there that could be used?

been tinkering to try to improve speeds, since the slowness is something that seems to come up a lot. network and peer limits come up pretty quick though.

[demopan]

I was thinking of creating a music streaming site on I2P in the future. The idea would be to allow people to discover music, without having to download massive FLAC files, but also intergrate magnet links or Postman's tracker to allow people to easily download the music if they wish. Perhaps you would be able to import torrents from Postman's tracker to ensure that the conversion to streamable opus files would be high quality.

Although, it should be noted that I am a programming n00b and barely know PHP. Chances are that this would also require a lot of storage and bandwidth.

[cumlord]

i like that idea! i2p could use more music and that'd be a good way to discover/download stuff.

i'm actively working on a tracker now, could use some testers. pm me if you want to try it out. it only has two categories now, i want federation working flawlessly along with a proper database for peercounts, since that's still calling from external trackers now.

ironing out the specs on the actual federation part now, i have a plan in mind but it's more a bunch of parts that mostly work and not fully working together yet.