this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Public torrents are already federated, no? You can publish a torrent with a single public tracker and when you check back two years later, the torrent is indexed by ~10+ public trackers.
Not exactly, not by the protocol anyway. It's true that bittorrent supports DHT search with magnet links, so in that way, particular torrents are distributed and decentralized. But AFAIK the ~~trackers~~ indexers do not share any protocol other than the fact they are hosting torrent files and magnet URLs.
Agreed, the trackers don't have a protocol for automatically federating.
But even beyond DHT, you can upload public torrents on new (for the torrent) trackers and they automatically get added to the swarm.
The real issue with torrents is that there is no method for federating private trackers.
Can you name any private trackers that actually have a need for federation?
The biggest issue I personally have with BT (v1) is not being able to search for a file by its checksum. I think v2 can do this, but almost nobody uses it in my experience.
Something along the lines of being able to access seeders for dead torrents on your tracker from other trackers (with some sort of accounting for economy).