Status of V2 (and mutable) torrents

Other platforms, generic questions.
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marciuk7

Status of V2 (and mutable) torrents

Post by marciuk7 »

Just wanted to discuss the current overall status of V2 torrents and their potential. How wide-spread are them currently? What's trackers' support? Do you see them around?

With their capabilities it would be much easier for normal users to share in example an entire library of files. The mutable torrent would also support updates to its content, so you could "subscribe" to a user shared library, etc.
The big limitation I currently see with V1 is that sharing back files for which you don't have the torrent is definitely not straightforward. In addition, common users are not prone to create torrents, as it looks much less intuitive than clicking a "share folder" button.

In addition, I understand V2 torrents are suited to identify identical files shared across different V2 torrents, which again would greatly improve the user experience.


Thoughts?
marciuk7

Re: Status of V2 (and mutable) torrents

Post by marciuk7 »

There is some movement on the topic, hope it gets more popular. The BT experience could be greatly improved if common clients would add user-friendly support to mutable torrents.

https://github.com/publiusfederalist/publius
https://github.com/publiusfederalist/federalist
https://github.com/RangerMauve/mutable-webtorrent

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/14263

Users would be able to share existing files in a much easier fashion.
A major shortcoming of the current BT ecosystem is that sharing back is quite convoluted. There are often multiple torrents for the same file(s), clients can't find similar torrents on their own as there's no concept of "search the DHT by file", swarm merging is partially supported. If a user has existing files and no corresponding torrent, sharing back it's just a painful process.. or one has to resort to creating yet another torrent. Also long-term seeding requires to keep torrents in the client which can slow down. Moving files is uneasy.. As great as BT might be, it suffers from some quite rigid design assumptions that could be mitigated by mutable torrents.

So spread the message, we need much better support in clients for mutable torrents.
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