It probably wouldn't be good for performance in a phone app, that's why I suggested the other more indirect approach of using a third-party image provider.
I had started a proof-of-concept of this for Astral. Wasn’t sure if the community wanted this. Can pick it back up. Devs, check out https://webtorrent.io ...
My main concern is whether it’s feasible to implement a torrent client inside a Swift app (Damus). Any iOS devs know / have an educated guess?
Discussion
Would you recommend a NIP to standardize how clients can integrate with various torrent-based image hosts? They should expose a single API that clients can code to, then a user can just choose which host they want to use by entering the API endpoint URL.
Wouldn’t it also be an issue that the amount of people wanting to leech using phone data would vastly outnumber those willing to seed?
That’s what those caching servers would be for. As soon as a new file is seeded (to the magnet tracker), the caching server would download it and start seeding it. So P2P-capable with a server backstop.