[Tempat]

I don’t know much about how the fediverse thing works. Would it be theoretically possible to have something kind of like how torrents work, with some central list of all servers acting as the “tracker list”?:

- Servers choose what they want to host and what their personal bandwidth limit is

- A user visiting a specific subforum automatically downloads from whatever servers are currently available to serve it

Then you’d never have to manually choose a server.

[wccrawford]

You don't have an identity on a torrent unless you join a server.

Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you can subscribe to other servers' communities from your original server.

[TylerE]

Torrents have magnet links, which don’t require servers at all.

[rf15]

That is untrue, you still need a server to facilitate discovery/passthrough. Peer-to-peer does not exist in the wider internet for most consumers.

[Izkata]

Trackerless torrents are very old now, they use the DHT network to find peers. I believe it needs to be seeded when you first start a newly installed client, but that's completely transparent to the user.

[Strom]

> you still need a server to facilitate discovery/passthrough

You could just bruteforce IPv4 until you hit a peer that will give you a set of known peers.

[throwawaymobule]

I don't think pex/dht operate on 'well known' ports. in fact, I think most clients are configured to randomize the port they use on each startup.

most every client comes with a list of 'bootstrap peers' for dht though.