Torrent implementation for decentralized media storage/streaming.
Discussion
Do people actually torrent from their phones? I mean sure it'd be cool for a nostr client to respond to magnet links/torrent files, but don't users want a separate app to manage the torrent session in that case? Personally I use a thin client to manage my torrents on a machine dedicated for that use and organize accordingly.
Automatically seeding torrents while opening a bunch of websocket connections to relays just seems...... wrong. Not looking to seed some stranger's cat pictures scrolling through my nostr feed
Or am I just too old to understand what people use? 🥹
My reasoning (that might be wrong/outdated in many ways) was:
Why "we" use centralized media silos in nostr? Isn't there a years tested protocol that could help?
It wouldn't be reasonable from mobile users to seed. But the "silo operators" could be the big seeders, while others could help to seed some parts. And some would probably just run archives of old and important stuff.
It would be easy for any new entity to permissionlessly "mirror" the content and add to the data resilience.
The nostr client could just download/stream and display/play the file(s) the magnet link points at as if it was any other image/sound/video. Seeding would be optional, the nostr client would "ask" some big seeder/pool to seed it for you.
It might need some new bits to be added to torrent or between torrent and nostr. No idea, I'm not a coder unfortunatelly. So I was interested to hear some feedback from people who are.
Also it's all well and working nicely as it is now. So there is no pressure. Until nostr becomes "public enemy" and the media silos disappear over night.
Not a problem for most cat memes and AI generated bitcoin logos, but not great for important content. Esp. when you can't edit the notes to point at a different address, breaking a lot of content permanently.
Not that torrent is perfect as seeders can disappear overnight as well. There would need to be many big ones.
Valuable content in old notes will get reposted just like old torrents 🙂 no worries
Notes don't need to last forever
I'm sure most of it will.
I'm also aware that not everyone cares about the old notes. Only the "tip of the spear" is important to them. I'm not in that camp, there is a lot of knowledge tossed around that you might like to find later on. There are events that will help to fight some future fights for freedom if you can point to them as an evidence.
Yeah I like that