Ask Lemmy

At some point bit torrent WAS an essential distribution tool. It represented nearly 70% of internet traffic!

So I think you're asking the wrong question...

A lot of stuff uses bittorrent for file transfers behind the scenes these days.

For nerdy nerds like us a torrent client isn't anything complicated. Regulating up and downstream bandwidth to personal preference isn't complicated. Managing torrents to seed and not isn't complicated. For your Average Joe though...

What are you even rambling about? Torrent has been essential.

IPFS, as well as many other P2P sharing technologies, on the other hand...

Pretty sure its being used in the backend by lots of huge things. I remember something about meta/facebook using it for server side stuff. I reckon many companies that have to distribute big updates use it as well like game companies. Its just not being used to liberate users but used to lighten the load on commercial infrastructure.

The costs of distribution aren't really that expensive for big companies.

You can't really trust that users are going to be willing to donate hard drive space and upload bandwidth to help your maps service or whatever work. (Though, to be fair, you did mention things like OpenStreetMap which is probably more likely for users to be willing to support that way.)

Bittorrent isn't something you can seamlessly integrate into browser-based apps.

But also, there are newer technologes based on a very Bittorrent-like P2P way of doing things. IPFS is basically reskinned Bittorrent. And Peertube uses in-browser P2P to distribute videos. I don't think there's any standard in, say, HTML5 that allows for P2P without some hacks, but it sounds like there's a good chance such a standard is likely to make its way into browsers in the relatively near future. Also, it sounds like Chrome supports more than Firefox in that area right now.

Hey just a heads up, you added an extra "to become" in your title. Anyway great question, I've always wondered this, hopefully someone knows better.

Perhaps the growth of everyone placing files on clouds these days may be contribute to its inpopularity, or simply because the name just got lumped together with copyright infringement.

I think that the idea of an app "stealing" bandwidth from its users because they want to save money on their own servers is a pretty bad look. Our current world is still not that great w/r/t internet quality, price, and availability, and it was surely worse in the past. It could definitely be more of a thing in the future, but maybe only for stuff used by techy people who could understand it and give proper consent.

You still need to seed and once the thing has been distributed, odds are good the clients will disconnect among the normies. Bittorrent only really works if everyone contributes space and bandwidth because you're really joining a community and curating data. And not everyone is nerdy or tech savvy enough to do that which means products aren't really going to be built around it.

I remember downloading metal gear online updates over p2p and thinking "world is changing". That was the last popular service I saw to use that technology over central server direct download.

Probably because bittorrent didn't have any way to rank users based on how much they seeded, and also the fact that it wasn't configured properly out of the box with basically every program that I have viewed. By default, bit torrent destroys the CPU in your router with as many as 500 active connections.

Another reason is that so much software is commercial, and these companies want to maintain control over the servers for tax reasons but also so they can end the products life very early and try to force users to buy new versions. Not every video game does this but many of the more corporate and publicly traded ones do this.

The costs of distribution aren't so expensive for anything but the largest amounts of data (video)

You can grab a digital ocean server droplet for $6 per month that allows a Terabyte of transfer. That's 0.6 cents per GB, and includes the compute to actually be able to serve that data as well as the transfer amount.

I think it, or derrivative methods are used more than you think, but aren't talked about because torrenting has a bad rep.

I believe windows update and World of Warcraft either do or did use p2p downloads for updates

Phones and tablets? They've displaced computers for a fair few people, and it's hard to consistently run a P2P client on those devices (And that's ignoring metered connection costs)

I mean it still has a purpose? Don't know where you're going with this, do you have some grudge against BitTorrent we don't know about?

It is widely used.

However it also has downsides on a technological level: by design it's a lot of connections which can be an issue so it doesn't work everywhere, especially playing well with other communications.

I guess it's because of IPv4, now majority of the people are likely behind carrier grade NAT making seeding impractical to do unless you have a purpose built machine with a public IP. This likely reduce adoption, doesn't help that it's usually associated with piracy so there is probably an incentive to stop or slow the use by the ISPs.

Its used in a lot of places. I'd say its about as essential as FTP, maybe a bit less. Take of that as you will.
I'm thinking of other problems BT could help solve, but I can't think of any. Maybe decentralized syncing of data across a global CDN network?
Would be great if we could utilize it for video sharing since bandwidth is always a problem there, but its not really designed for it. Though I think there's a lot of things we could solve with p2p, bittorrent may not be the correct protocol to use. A decentralized p2p marketplace was mentioned a few years back, but I can't recall any detail or even name now...

It's essential for me! how else will I get.my movies, shows and software?