this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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background; i had all my torrents seeding forever and i never set a limit mostly because when i set up qbittorrent i was new and never really went into options.

i want to be able to control and limit the bandwidth i use but is 50kb/s during the day/10kb/s at night unreasonable? i dont want to be rude or make it hard for people to get things but i also just don't want thinks to balloon out of control (before i just keep everything in seeding perpetually just because i never bothered to look).

am i being unreasonable with limits? i obviously dont want to download and just stop; i always want to at least share back to at least 1.

these are mostly public trackers btw

thanks <3

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[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 1 points 31 minutes ago

I generally seed to a ratio of 10, but if it is popular with lots of seeds I'll stop it early, anything with under 10 seeds I have set to seed for ever - some of them are now into the 1000's for the ratio

So my point is maybe choose what to seed rather than limit the speed - but no judgment as long as you give something back

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 hour ago

It's not really rude, no one really knows what your top upload speed is or how much of it you have to be able to use. Many people out there torrenting have horrible upload and download speeds but the benefit of the torrent protocol is that a bunch of people seeding a file with horrible upload speed can still result in fast downloads for you.

The only ones who might take issue with it are private trackers who might require that people have fast uploads or upload a lot in a specific time frame.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 hour ago

Public trackers? No, nobody cares. On private trackers, where sharing and keeping the content alive is important, share ratios are often tracked very closely, and you can be banned if you aren't sharing enough back.

[–] SaneMartigan@aussie.zone 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Lol, the ethics of piracy.

It depends on your connection, country, ability to seed and probably a few other things I'm not thinking of.

I squatted for a while with 40gb per month on my mobile, I didn't seed shit.

I rented a seedbox for a few years and seeded some things into the thousands ratio.

Plenty of people use Streamio which is straight leeching.

Do what you can. The higher the ratio the better.

I feel that if something has taken weeks/months to download I try to seed that for a while. If something is super popular its got enough support that I'm not making any difference.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 8 points 2 hours ago

No. The strength of Torrenting is that a bunch of slow connections can combine into one fast download.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 59 points 4 hours ago

It's not the rate, it's the ratio.

[–] fizzle@quokk.au 23 points 4 hours ago

No one cares or will even notice your lack of participation.

Some seeders have amazing infrastructure and can seed in an hour what would take you a year on a residential connection.

This is not an "if everyone did that" problem because not everyone has limited residential bandwidth.

If youre worried about moral obligations adopt a few torrents with very low numbers of seeders to ensure they dont die.

Alternatively, you could rent a seed box for a month and upload 5 years worth.

[–] cranakis@reddthat.com 32 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

As long as you seed with a ratio > 1 you're good in my eyes!

[–] fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 hour ago

I've got years old torrents on my seedbox.I forgot about. 2000 ratio lol

[–] flork@lemy.lol 12 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I do 4x or 1 month whichever comes first. Unless I notice it's some really hard to come by thing and I may leave it up for a year or more.

I just leave my torrents until deluge starts crashing. If one thing is super popular I’m not gonna stop it from boosting my ratio. Most sit idle with almost no interest 95% of the time.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 9 points 4 hours ago

I try but on some it's really hard. If there are so many seeders that you are unable to seed much yourself then that should also be ok.

[–] HumanOnEarth@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 hours ago

Yes what everyone else said, ratio is the only one that really matters.

I seed to 10.0 on pretty much everything unless it takes forever and takes up a lot of space.

Certain things, mostly things that are for the common good (books, practical software, documentaries) I seed forever.

As long as you're giving more than you're taking in the long run, you're good. If you cannot for whatever reason, someone will have your back and don't worry about it.

[–] sobchak@programming.dev 3 points 3 hours ago

I used to. My current router seems to handle QoS gracefully, so I haven't found a need to. For the last year or so, I've been seeding everything until it gets > 2 ratio and there are > 10 seeders, otherwise I just keep seeding. I just looked, and I have one torrent with > 200 ratio, lol.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 4 hours ago

You have to set some upload and connection limits or it will slow down your internet for everything else. What you set those limits to will depend on your internet connection.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 10 points 4 hours ago

I'll make up for it don't worry

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 hours ago

Keep the attitude and do what you can! Its very from each as per their ability for each as per their need.

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Those are pretty low limits but without knowing your actual bandwidth, or if you're dealing with data caps, can't say if you're being rude.. but you're probably fine. In the end you contribute what you can, and seeding is still better than not seeding :)

My own rule of thumb, if my running p2p software needs to have bandwidth limits then I aim for at least 1 Mbit/s (122 KiB/s) to contribute to the network. But that assumes you actually have 1+ Mbit/s internet upload and no data caps, people around the world have different available speeds.

Might be helpful too https://duckduckgo.com/?q=50+kibibyte+to+megabit

[–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

i only did it at 50 kbs for now because i was at like 6tb or whatever before and i wanted to stabilise before gradually moving back up :)

[–] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 hours ago

Keep in mind QBit uses kibibyte units while your ISP reports speeds in megabits. You can also set it to change speeds depending on the time of day. I have mine limited during the hours I typically have people streaming from my server and have it uncapped from like 2am - 8am.