Distribute resources via torrent

crimethinc / website

Ruby on Rails app that powers crimethinc.com

https://crimethinc.com

Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal

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Distribute resources via torrent #1212

Open elevenpassin opened 5 years ago

elevenpassin commented 5 years ago

Hello!

Nice website and great content! This is all well and good but there are a couple of problems that I have noticed on the website, one of which I will try to explain in this issue.

I have noticed that most of the content is directly hosted on the website. While this is okay for most cases, for a website with radical ideas, it's always a good idea to have a p2p / decentralised way of distributing the content. My suggestion is to host / seed all of your zines, books, tools and other downloadable resources on bittorrent and give the option of downloading and seeding a resource via bittorrent. Additionally, a nice to have feature would be to archive all the website resources into a single zip and then seeding on a torrent.

Other websites that have done this so far:

libcom (unofficial)
marxists.org

veganstraightedge commented 5 years ago

@buoyantair That's a good idea! Is that something that you could help us out with?

just1602 commented 5 years ago

https://archive.org allow torrent download of content on their servers. So maybe an easy solution would be to upload zine and other stuff directly on archive.org and expose the torrent link?

elevenpassin commented 5 years ago

@just1602 One problem with Archive.org is that you will not be able to seed all the content at once if you used collections. Which means you will have to individually download all the torrent files and seed them, which can be tedious. @veganstraightedge One more solution would be to archive the zines and upload them as a single file. This would mean we will be able to seed the torrent and at the same time have all the data backed up and archived.

veganstraightedge commented 5 years ago

Hmm. What happens when a new zine is published?

elevenpassin commented 5 years ago

@veganstraightedge usually someone can take the responsiblity of updating the archive every 3-6 months with new zines. But yeah at the end of the day maybe it's tedious. I think the first reasonable steps we should take are:

Upload the zines to a collection in Archive.org
Link each and every zine artifact to the website page

Another thing you would want to do is, maybe create a middleware function that will automatically archive any new content as soon as it's uploaded.

Bear in mind that just uploading it will not work out. Creating the torrent is only the beginning. We should try to get other people to seed this content. Seeding is something that you will have to educate and encourage anarchists about. Also other stuff like bittorrent, dat, centralization vs decentralization vs p2p etc. Well anyways going off topic.

just1602 commented 5 years ago

We should check this : https://archive.org/services/docs/api/

elevenpassin commented 5 years ago

@just1602 That's a good starting point!

reedjones commented 3 years ago

perhaps IPFS could be an option? https://ipfs.io/

elevenpassin commented 3 years ago

@reedjones IPFS can certainly be an option!