this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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Just a small way to help people get their FOSS. What are some other projects that have torrents that would be good to seed?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Anna's Archive can always use help

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Is it legal? There may be alternatives with plausible deniability.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Don't know, I'm not up on copyright law.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Not FOSS, but a library/archive: https://annas-archive.org/torrents

Popular Linux ISOs are usually mirrored across a lot of mirrors (duh), so availability is already very good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

At 16kb/s per connection , I think you have to ask yourself if you’re really helping. Have you checked your settings that you aren’t limiting your upload speeds?

Edit: people seem to be offended by this comment, so let me clarify by what I meant with “are you really helping”.

Torrent clients default to a fixed number of peers they download from. If you end up with only 16kb/s connections, you are being limited by those seeders in how fast you can download.

Whereas if there were less seeders but they could provide 1mb/s connections, you are limited by your own internet connection and are downloading full blast.

I hope that clarifies my statement.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'd rather have a 16kb/s seeder than a dead torrent

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

For real. I’m slowly downloading a documentary from one person right now, it’s been a few weeks and it’ll be a few more, but I thank them for it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I have had torrents that ran at extremely low speeds and also intermittently were offline because the seeder ran a colossal seedbox but rotated “inventory” to be able to seed more than just what they could handle at once. So it was rotating content. I downloaded something for almost three months I think. But eventually I got it all. Funny thing was I seeded it for the next like 6 months to help, but literally nobody ever connected, so I felt very fortunate that being apparently the only person who seemed to want the thing, I had found a seeder.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

If it makes you feel any better, I had a torrent that took about a week to download. 12 months later my ratio is 139 or something. I like to think I resurrected it with the help of that one lone seeder.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How do you find seeders of rare content?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Well, occasionally I’ll just be lucky enough I’ll try a result on a tracker that says 0 seeds. I try those all the time if I really can’t find a torrent with seeds. Lots of the ones that are seemingly dead, will kick up again at some point. I’ve had a lot of luck with even dead seeds from results on magnetdl.com and bitsearch.to but the latter you really want to have adblocks because they load a dozen of those shitty vpn ads every minute and they’re new window pop ups. Without Adblock I’d never even visit that site. But they have an excellent catalogue so I do use them. Magnetdl used to be my goto but lately they’ve had all kinds of weird cloudflare errors. Cloudflare sucks.

But aside from that and if someone seeds something upon request it’s just blind luck. But my main point I guess would be don’t shy away from links with 0 seeds indicated.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

same boat, what documentary?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Under an Arctic Sky. It’s about surfers going to Iceland to.. surf, I assume

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

https://tubitv.com/movies/100004335/under-an-arctic-sky?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed

use video downloaderhelper or internet download manager and rip it. this one is 720p, but if you find it on another site, should be able to rip it in 1080p at least.

here it is in 1080p - https://www.redbull.com/us-en/films/under-an-arctic-sky

i'm also adding this link to my seeds once it finishes - magnet:?xt=urn:btih:4e578d0794506d804554b409c5c71db8e3cb48ee

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Thank you so much for that! I’ve been out of the country for a week, will take a look at what’s going on when I get home :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Torrent clients are usually smart enough to decide what the best seeders are to get the best possible availability and throughput.

OP seeding at 16 KB/s to some peers might also just mean that the leecher's bandwidth is mostly saturated by other peers so they don't need that much bandwidth from OP.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

At 16kb/s per connection , I think you have to ask yourself if you’re really helping

That's a rather toxic mentality to have. Any amount of help is always appreciated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

This feels like you don't really understand how the BitTorrent protocol works at all. When you watch Netflix, or download proprietary software (for example Steam) you are connected through a CDN to the geographically closest node. That's one of the main reasons it can be so fast.

However, torrent files aren't distributed by geographic region, the pool of peers is spread out across the globe. So if someone is on the other side of the earth, your upload speed to them is going to be quite small.

You're suggesting OP stop seeding because those seeders will be able to download faster, but we literally see just a snapshot. There could be leechers local to OP that come online and have a close, fast seed.

I'm generally seeding at 50-100kB/s, and when I check those connections they're almost always overseas (qBittorrent resolves the IPs and adds country flags). However, when another Aussie (or a Kiwi, sometimes Indonesians too) leecher connects, it'll often blow past my (ISPs) 50Mbps upload cap to 160-200Mbps or 20-25MB/s. Are you saying I shouldn't seed because that way an American or European will be able to download faster? Even though it's been pointed out to you that it doesn't even work that way. The BitTorrent protocol was designed from the start to mitigate this by prioritisation of peers on the clientside.

I can't believe such a toxic and inaccurate comment has this many upvotes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You're suggesting OP stop seeding because those seeders will be able to download faster, but we literally see just a snapshot.

I suggested that OP check their settings.

Are you saying I shouldn't seed because that way an American or European will be able to download faster?

Again, that’s not what I am saying at all. Stop putting words in my mouth.

I can't believe such a toxic and inaccurate comment has this many upvotes.

If you’re looking for a toxic comment, look at your own where you are wilfully misrepresenting my argument, make wild assumptions and then attack those. That's textbook definition of toxic behavior.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Don’t most clients switch to seeders that deliver faster? Over time, I mean?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

new House of the Dragon episodes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Does anybody download iso's via torrents? Or how to help the actual sites that serve these? Since I trust the source more than torrents.. Especially for an image..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Verifiying the checksum of an iso takes 30 seconds... You don't need to trust anyone

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Been on Linux 6 years, never done it. Extra steps

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Length of time never means quality of decisions. Always best to validate. So easy to package up malware and farm folks bank accounts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Hence my threat model hasn't included torrents.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You grab the .torrent file from the source website (Mint, in this case) and it's safe

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Ahh makes sense. I still direct download but I guess if I had Torrent client locally it might be nice. But 3-4GiB on direct download doesn't take long..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

It's more of a way to reduce costs for the CDN, using torrents everyone contributes and they only have to send a small magnet file.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It doesn't, but thousands of people all downloading 3-4GB from the same site will put more load on the site. Torrents avoid this issue by downloading little bits from lots of different peers

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I prefer to download isos via torrents. You can easily check the checksum and signature once it's downloaded. And you're getting the torrent/magnet link/etc from the source so it's not some random torrent from piratebay or something lmao

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Why not direct download from website?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Avoid detracting from the hosts bandwidth quota.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Can be faster than downloading from a centralised server that everyone is trying to download from. But mostly just habit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I think it saves them costs but idk shit about servers

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Wikipedia torrents from kiwix

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

netbsd.org will love that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

The Rotating Food Gifs Collection 1-5

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You're not seeding properly, check your upload settings or try qBittorrent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

OP has acceptable seed ratio on the files near the bottom.