Mutable bittorrents...

[Betonhaus]

Would it be possible to have some sort of torrent versioning? Like instead of having everyone automatically download the updated torrent the torrent would have a change ledger like on GitHub. Then when you add files you push a new version, some people can choose to always use the latest version, or others could get a little badge or notice that’s there’s a new version of the torrent and they can review the chances and choose to update, or possibly even roll back to one of the older torrent versions if a bunch of crap got added to the latest version.

This could be done in conjunction with a “meta torrent” which is basically a list of different torrents with file selections. So say you offer a torrent with a bunch of files and it turns out one of the files is mislabeled or corrupted, instead of having to create an entirely new torrent you could just make a metatorrent that takes the older torrent and renames one of the files or replaces it with a file downloaded from a different torrent.

Combine the two ideas and you can leave the torrents as static but issue metatorrents that get updated, so when a new episode is out everyone who is downloading the metatorrent and have it set to update will automatically download the new episode’s torrent and add it to the folder.

You could have a discovery thing where when you download a torrent you can search for all metatorrents that have this torrent added (not sure how you would rank legitamacy and filter out scams) in order to find updates and such.

 

[ChefBourgeoisie]

Then when you add files you push a new version, some people can choose to always use the latest version, or others could get a little badge or notice that’s there’s a new version of the torrent and they can review the chances and choose to update, or possibly even roll back to one of the older torrent versions if a bunch of crap got added to the latest version.

All of these options already exist. You should download (or build) one of the releases and see for yourself. Find a friend to experiment with. It's pretty neat. It's possible that my interface is clunky or unpolished, I welcome feedback.

Check it out. You might like it. And once you get to using it, you might ask why it's taken so long... the bittorrent people released the idea for this over 10 years ago. No one's bothered to implement it.

 

[Betonhaus]

All of these options already exist. You should download (or build) one of the releases and see for yourself. Find a friend to experiment with. It's pretty neat. It's possible that my interface is clunky or unpolished, I welcome feedback.

Check it out. You might like it. And once you get to using it, you might ask why it's taken so long... the bittorrent people released the idea for this over 10 years ago. No one's bothered to implement it.

You kind of get a chicken/egg dilemmia where you can't really use it until the toorent seeders use it and the torrent seeders won't use it if nobody uses it. and if people repackage the torrents they've now split the seeders so some people will seed the original torrent and some people will seed the new torrent and eventually they both stop seeding because there doesn't seem to be enough interest due to there not beign a lot of seeders. The internet is filled with dead torrents with no seeders. a metatorrent system would allow anyone to make a curated metatorrent of other torrents, and would actually reduce dead torrents because instead of people releasing torrents of individual files and torrents of collections side by side, people would just need to release torrents of the individual files and metatorrents that download all of the individual torrents

 

[ChefBourgeoisie]

You kind of get a chicken/egg dilemmia where you can't really use it until the toorent seeders use it

So be a seeder. It's more about will anyone be a leecher, if you ask me. I could seed one of these torrents right now, but anyone who showed up to download it would only get the first, and none of the subsequent files because they're using the told clients.

I think in that case it might actually be useful to include a readme file in the torrent, telling people to go get a client that does mutable torrents. No idea if anyone would read it though.