There are no genralisable hacks in this world, sadly. Hence why everyone pays Cloudflare or Bunny or whomever.
Discussion
No. They pay for those because the world has gotten lazy. Everyone is lazy and they want to take shortcuts.
They pay because nothing else works for users at scale. There are a number of technical reasons why you can't shoehorn Bittorrent into a CDN for a twitter clone. Latency first of all. The latency you'll get from Bittorrent, even in the best of times, will be a far far cry from what you'll get with even a lower-end CDN.
nostr:npub1rtlqca8r6auyaw5n5h3l5422dm4sry5dzfee4696fqe8s6qgudks7djtfs posted this video, it's 475MB.
5 minutes of handbrake, without spending any time optimizing settings, on a non-server grade GPU, turned it into 91 MB, with only slight loss of quality (which most won't perceive). With proper optimization it could be 50MB with no loss in quality but I'm not running my GPU for 3 hours, or renting a GPU online to prove a point.
My internet at home can download that 91MB straight in under 1 second. I can also seed that much in the same time.
But this is a best case scenario; let's look at worst case.
If I have as little as 1 peer with a garbage upload, sub 1Mbps and my download is also sub 1Mbps, the video is roughly 7 minutes, so 13MB per minute, 221kb per second, I would be able to watch it, as its being downloaded, at 2x speed without any lag.
This does not pass for internet video in 2025.
