Just a small way to help people get their FOSS. What are some other projects that have torrents that would be good to seed?

  • riplin@lemm.ee
    10930·
    4 months ago

    At 16kb/s per connection , I think you have to ask yourself if you’re really helping. Have you checked your settings that you aren’t limiting your upload speeds?

    Edit: people seem to be offended by this comment, so let me clarify by what I meant with “are you really helping”.

    Torrent clients default to a fixed number of peers they download from. If you end up with only 16kb/s connections, you are being limited by those seeders in how fast you can download.

    Whereas if there were less seeders but they could provide 1mb/s connections, you are limited by your own internet connection and are downloading full blast.

    I hope that clarifies my statement.

      • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
        57·
        4 months ago

        For real. I’m slowly downloading a documentary from one person right now, it’s been a few weeks and it’ll be a few more, but I thank them for it

        • AndrewZabar@lemmy.world
          19·
          4 months ago

          I have had torrents that ran at extremely low speeds and also intermittently were offline because the seeder ran a colossal seedbox but rotated “inventory” to be able to seed more than just what they could handle at once. So it was rotating content. I downloaded something for almost three months I think. But eventually I got it all. Funny thing was I seeded it for the next like 6 months to help, but literally nobody ever connected, so I felt very fortunate that being apparently the only person who seemed to want the thing, I had found a seeder.

            • AndrewZabar@lemmy.world
              9·
              4 months ago

              Well, occasionally I’ll just be lucky enough I’ll try a result on a tracker that says 0 seeds. I try those all the time if I really can’t find a torrent with seeds. Lots of the ones that are seemingly dead, will kick up again at some point. I’ve had a lot of luck with even dead seeds from results on magnetdl.com and bitsearch.to but the latter you really want to have adblocks because they load a dozen of those shitty vpn ads every minute and they’re new window pop ups. Without Adblock I’d never even visit that site. But they have an excellent catalogue so I do use them. Magnetdl used to be my goto but lately they’ve had all kinds of weird cloudflare errors. Cloudflare sucks.

              But aside from that and if someone seeds something upon request it’s just blind luck. But my main point I guess would be don’t shy away from links with 0 seeds indicated.

          • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            4·
            3 months ago

            If it makes you feel any better, I had a torrent that took about a week to download. 12 months later my ratio is 139 or something. I like to think I resurrected it with the help of that one lone seeder.

            • AndrewZabar@lemmy.world
              3·
              3 months ago

              No need to feel any better lol none of what I said was troubling. But it’s nice that the torrenting community in general is not just a bunch of leeches. I suspect that is because of the lack of widespread popularity which is good. This should continue to remain a subculture to a certain extent.

      • stewi@sh.itjust.works
        71·
        3 months ago

        The torrents include the normal http download URLs and fetch from them too. Official torrents never die.

    • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works
      7115·
      4 months ago

      At 16kb/s per connection , I think you have to ask yourself if you’re really helping

      That’s a rather toxic mentality to have. Any amount of help is always appreciated.

    • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
      43·
      4 months ago

      Torrent clients are usually smart enough to decide what the best seeders are to get the best possible availability and throughput.

      OP seeding at 16 KB/s to some peers might also just mean that the leecher’s bandwidth is mostly saturated by other peers so they don’t need that much bandwidth from OP.

    • admin@sh.itjust.works
      161·
      4 months ago

      You’d be surprised to know that a 500GB hard drive can be theoretically copied in 1 year with a 16kb/s transfer.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 months ago

      Whereas if there were less seeders but they could provide 1mb/s connections, you are limited by your own internet connection

      Gigabit internet connection gang rise up!

    • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      58·
      3 months ago

      This feels like you don’t really understand how the BitTorrent protocol works at all. When you watch Netflix, or download proprietary software (for example Steam) you are connected through a CDN to the geographically closest node. That’s one of the main reasons it can be so fast.

      However, torrent files aren’t distributed by geographic region, the pool of peers is spread out across the globe. So if someone is on the other side of the earth, your upload speed to them is going to be quite small.

      You’re suggesting OP stop seeding because those seeders will be able to download faster, but we literally see just a snapshot. There could be leechers local to OP that come online and have a close, fast seed.

      I’m generally seeding at 50-100kB/s, and when I check those connections they’re almost always overseas (qBittorrent resolves the IPs and adds country flags). However, when another Aussie (or a Kiwi, sometimes Indonesians too) leecher connects, it’ll often blow past my (ISPs) 50Mbps upload cap to 160-200Mbps or 20-25MB/s. Are you saying I shouldn’t seed because that way an American or European will be able to download faster? Even though it’s been pointed out to you that it doesn’t even work that way. The BitTorrent protocol was designed from the start to mitigate this by prioritisation of peers on the clientside.

      I can’t believe such a toxic and inaccurate comment has this many upvotes.

      • riplin@lemm.ee
        42·
        3 months ago

        You’re suggesting OP stop seeding because those seeders will be able to download faster, but we literally see just a snapshot.

        I suggested that OP check their settings.

        Are you saying I shouldn’t seed because that way an American or European will be able to download faster?

        Again, that’s not what I am saying at all. Stop putting words in my mouth.

        I can’t believe such a toxic and inaccurate comment has this many upvotes.

        If you’re looking for a toxic comment, look at your own where you are wilfully misrepresenting my argument, make wild assumptions and then attack those. That’s textbook definition of toxic behavior.

    • gitamar@feddit.orgDeutsch
      5·
      4 months ago

      Be sure to check the checksum after downloading and check if the release is somehow up to date. They only list raspberry pi os images older than a year

  • Blizzard@lemmy.zipEnglish
    123·
    4 months ago

    You’re not seeding properly, check your upload settings or try qBittorrent.

  • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
    94·
    4 months ago

    Does anybody download iso’s via torrents? Or how to help the actual sites that serve these? Since I trust the source more than torrents… Especially for an image…

      • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        4 months ago

        Ahh makes sense. I still direct download but I guess if I had Torrent client locally it might be nice. But 3-4GiB on direct download doesn’t take long…

        • FierySpectre@lemmy.world
          18·
          4 months ago

          It’s more of a way to reduce costs for the CDN, using torrents everyone contributes and they only have to send a small magnet file.

        • jrgd@lemm.ee
          8·
          4 months ago

          For many with unstable ISP connections, http downloads can get corrupted. Torrents are superior in this regard as the file gets split into blocks that each get checksummed for integrity after completion. This helps to ensure that the large iso is actually complete and won’t just be garbage on an attempted install. Even if you checksum the iso from http download, you have to pull the entire thing again if it is damaged whereas the torrent would just repull the damaged blocks automatically.

        • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          It doesn’t, but thousands of people all downloading 3-4GB from the same site will put more load on the site. Torrents avoid this issue by downloading little bits from lots of different peers

    • Maetani@jlai.lu
      171·
      4 months ago

      Verifiying the checksum of an iso takes 30 seconds… You don’t need to trust anyone

      • Sekki@lemmy.ml
        101·
        4 months ago

        I don’t think that is even necessary. If you download the .torrent file from a trusted source it will already contain a secure hash of the final file. Also every piece you receive also comes with a hash that can also be verified through the .torrent file. If you don’t trust the source enough to provide a valid .torrent, I don’t see how downloading the image directly from them makes any difference. Read more: Official BitTorrent BEP BitTorrent V2 and SHA-256

      • weker01@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        4 months ago

        Well you do need to trust the checksum provided. That is the one you are checking against. Better would be a signature from a key you trust.

        In the end a modern torrent is just a hash.

    • communism@lemmy.ml
      14·
      4 months ago

      I prefer to download isos via torrents. You can easily check the checksum and signature once it’s downloaded. And you’re getting the torrent/magnet link/etc from the source so it’s not some random torrent from piratebay or something lmao