You can also just directly download the movie from archive.org with the regular download link, but using bittorrent is good for the soul and good for the internet :), and archive.org is a great place to practice!
Archive.org hosts all of its content on its servers, but it also can make everything available via .torrent for very little additional infrastructure and it makes the archive more robust. When you download a .torrent from archive.org, its servers operate as "Web Seeds" - or regular HTTP servers that can serve you a copy of the file. If nobody else is downloading or has downloaded the .torrent, then it operates the same as if you were to just download it from their servers.
The cool part is what happens when there are multiple people who are downloading/have downloaded the .torrent. Say you are archive.org and it's a nice pleasant sunday afternoon and all of a sudden you get swarmed by ppl wanting to watch monsterdon. Regular HTTP servers have to divide up the available bandwidth they have across each person, so a sudden inrush of everyone wanting to watch something at once makes the whole thing slower for everyone (monsterdon is a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the total bandwidth archive.org needs to serve, and i don't know archive.org's server infra, so that's just for the sake of illustration).
Bittorrent actually gets faster when more people are downloading a file at the same time. You download the file as a bunch of smaller pieces. As you complete each piece, you are able to tell all the other people downloading that you have completed that piece, and they can download it from you! Once you finish the whole torrent, you are able to serve the whole thing just the same as archive.org's servers can. This makes a distributed archive that is more resilient than just having everything on archive.org alone - with many smaller computers and smaller connections, we make something very mighty :).
archive is just one example, bittorrent is a great way to share large files generally - see our friends over at https://academictorrents.com/ where a ton of scientific and research data is hosted in a distributed archive. It's not as flashy as whatever fancy fuckin cloud platform landing page will sell you, but it's a way of keeping the dream of what the internet could be alive (as we rekindle the dormant spirit of p2p while the logic of the cloud internet causes it to eat itself)
Dr. jonny phd /
npub1ny…dxmrh
2023-08-14 00:05:35
in reply to nevent1q…mdcd
Author Public Key
npub1nyn0d3f3vgefljenfq0schd55q2mm43a2errd6sncdw5jawpwm3s3dxmrhPublished at
2023-08-14 00:05:35Event JSON
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"created_at": 1691971535,
"kind": 1,
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"content": "You can also just directly download the movie from archive.org with the regular download link, but using bittorrent is good for the soul and good for the internet :), and archive.org is a great place to practice! \n\nArchive.org hosts all of its content on its servers, but it also can make everything available via .torrent for very little additional infrastructure and it makes the archive more robust. When you download a .torrent from archive.org, its servers operate as \"Web Seeds\" - or regular HTTP servers that can serve you a copy of the file. If nobody else is downloading or has downloaded the .torrent, then it operates the same as if you were to just download it from their servers. \n\nThe cool part is what happens when there are multiple people who are downloading/have downloaded the .torrent. Say you are archive.org and it's a nice pleasant sunday afternoon and all of a sudden you get swarmed by ppl wanting to watch monsterdon. Regular HTTP servers have to divide up the available bandwidth they have across each person, so a sudden inrush of everyone wanting to watch something at once makes the whole thing slower for everyone (monsterdon is a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the total bandwidth archive.org needs to serve, and i don't know archive.org's server infra, so that's just for the sake of illustration). \n\nBittorrent actually gets faster when more people are downloading a file at the same time. You download the file as a bunch of smaller pieces. As you complete each piece, you are able to tell all the other people downloading that you have completed that piece, and they can download it from you! Once you finish the whole torrent, you are able to serve the whole thing just the same as archive.org's servers can. This makes a distributed archive that is more resilient than just having everything on archive.org alone - with many smaller computers and smaller connections, we make something very mighty :). \n\narchive is just one example, bittorrent is a great way to share large files generally - see our friends over at https://academictorrents.com/ where a ton of scientific and research data is hosted in a distributed archive. It's not as flashy as whatever fancy fuckin cloud platform landing page will sell you, but it's a way of keeping the dream of what the internet could be alive (as we rekindle the dormant spirit of p2p while the logic of the cloud internet causes it to eat itself)",
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}