What can be (realisticly) improved for a better and easier experience
- more stremio add-ons for subtitles and media sources, specially for shows in lat span
- a Foss good anime client for android tv
One click install that provides regional VPN, multi-index torrent searching, scheduling, auto downloading based on simple criteria, and then file and metadata management.
I do all this now with various apps, but a single package that does everything that I could install on a new machine and start downloading immediately.
This is my dream app.
A different, better protocol for sharing. Torrent is cool but files on it tend to die off, and also can’t be updated. I’m thinking something like syncthing might be the future.
eMule was better in this regard, since you shared a folder you kept sharing all your files indefinitely (provided that you kept them in that folder).
Yeah, ensuring availability over time requires dedicated infra. That’s basically what it comes down to. Torrents for the most part lack dedicated providers ensuring file availability. Web seeds exist, but the uploader or the tracker needs to have the resources to back their torrents with bandwidth and storage. Other decentralized solutions, like say IPFS, don’t solve the resources problem, because it’s not technical, so although you can pay to have content “pinned” in place on IPFS, or you can pin it yourself, that “pinning” requires a server, running off electricity, using someone else’s uplink to serve the content, all of which costs. If you don’t have your own server, and don’t pay someone else to pin it for you, it could easily fall off IPFS.
Syncthing could honestly help, I’ve thought about this a fair amount, although you’d still have the resources issues. Availability of content over syncthing or something like it would likely still be tied to popularity (how long are uploaders going to keep their syncthing folders full of specific content? how long will downloaders? In order for it to really work people would have to get in the habit of building out NAS’s and putting their libraries on syncthing forever, basically). It still has some of the same basic issues with torrent, but the dynamicness is cool for sure.
Yes the availability will remain an issue but at least I imagine that solving other issues could make it less serious.
More specifically, the issue (a feature too but still) with torrents is how spread they are. It’s difficult to know what is available and in what condition. There are dozens if not hundreds private trackers etc. This all makes it more likely for new torrents for the same content to be created multiple times, and overall seeding resources to be spread out across multiple versions of the same things. Some centralized public index might have helped everyone find things faster and prolong those things’ availability as the result. What such an index might need to stay damage-proof and useful is unrelated to this discussion, but I imagine it might work as some blockchain and thus may not require much in terms of resources.
I didn’t mean syncthing itself but some theoretical derivative that would have relevant features.
It would help to involve a kind of software infrastructure where users would choose how much resources (mostly disk space) they are willing to give in order to contribute to the overall availability of stuff.
Torrent search engine would be a great start, similar like qbittorrent search plugins
I really want IPFS to go mainstream. It solves a lot of problems with piracy and the internet in general. But people started thinking it was a blockchain thing, and I haven’t heard much about it since then. Libgen uses it but that’s the only place I’ve seen it be embraced.
Would you need a VPN for that? Cause if the MPAA lawyers have to throw money at programmers to make an example, then they will.
If you do need a VPN, then i2P would be a better choice, though it suffers from network size/speed.
Edit 01:
Per https://lemmy.ca/u/mp3 https://lemmy.ca/comment/2015681
File discoverability is poor, most people will not know how to act as a node and mirror files, and there’s no builtin privacy protection in place and it’s quite easy to figure out which IP addresses are hosting something.
