The internet needs a better way to share stuff than a fixed list of files. It should be easy to simply browse through a shared folder and decide to participate in storing and hosting that file.

Having to split huge archives like this into multiple torrents is such a terrible workaround. It requires those with huge storage to host the torrents. People who just require a subset can't properly participate.

Such a pity IPFS is so crap. It should be been the solution to this, but alas...

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The torrent protocol is quite happy for you to only download and seed some files within a torrent, it's just that the most popular client for it isn't very good at managing very large archives.

I'm guessing there's probably an alternative client that is better at this, can anyone tell me what it is? If there isn't one I'll make one, but I don't want to burn a weekend duplicating something that already exists...

[–] Kissaki@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 weeks ago

qBittorrent handles selections of individual files quite well. The only downside is a side effect of the protocol: If a data block spans two files (because their size is not an exact multiple) it will create a "partial" file with a strange name next to it - which you need to keep it complete/seeding.

[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What's crap about IPFS? I've never used it, but have always been intrigued.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It's a resource hog and quite unstable. A major gripe I have with it is that it makes accessing what you downloaded very difficult because the documentation is terrible. It should be possible to mount all your downloaded stuff into a folder, but I have yet to figure out how. And despite all its resource usage, it is very slow.

The idea is amazing (peer-to-peer, content-addressed storage), but the implementation is extremely lacking.

[–] axx@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 weeks ago

It's got lots of great ideas (combining what's essentially a giant git repo with bit torrent), but in practice it's pretty slow to do anything