[uobytx2]

Yeah, but there are so many reasons not to torrent. Cable upload speeds still suck because of a combo of technical limitations and very slow investment in new equipment, and not enough people have fiber yet.

Worse, many are getting deeper into the CG NAT on IPv4 with possibly no ipv6 available. Combined with households having more people and devices needing the internet from the same router than ever before, makes it less likely someone is just going to figure out how to forward a port.

Sure, there are some workarounds, but the real failure here is in not moving to ipv6 and fiber fast enough to support any p2p tech. There’s basically zero generations that ever had p2p ready internet.

[jauntywundrkind]

Upload speed seems like a non-concern, just based on time. Even very active people are going to spend like 1% of available time downloading. So effective net upload bandwidth is going to be 100x bigger (times by your connections up/down speed ratio).

So long as people seed for some time, there tends to be amazing availability and absurdly fast speeds.

I'd love exact numbers but my impression is 80%+ of consumer wifi routers ship with upnp-igd and often Apple's nat-pmpd, which means any torrent program you open worth a salt will port-forward just fine. I can't think of the last household wifi I was on that didn't have upnp-igd, it's been so long.

In some ways p2p has been underinvested in because it has worked so well for so long. Various public & private trackers have come and gone but theres been a variety of good-enough options. Tribler pioneered p2p search over BitTorrent a long time ago & some users report that works surprisingly well for them & I think maybe that technique is semi widely done in clients now.

I think the main thing is just getting new folks in the door, and setup to find stuff. Bandwidth & connectivity seem pretty great. But we keep having major trackers collapse, and it's unclear how to get people started & successful.

[rokkitmensch]

Torrenting from your home connection is a fools mission. Shared infra in a friendly jurisdiction is less than a Netflix subscription, and comes with one-click web UIs for your favorite torrent client.

Clicking around in my providers web panel yesterday I discovered they went so far as to serve up my downloads directory over http behind basic auth so I can download things directly to my phone while on the go.

A little bit more secret sauce: I have a script that rsyncs everything from the downloads/kids dir into a folder the kids can access on the Linux machine plugged into the TVs (and idem for the adults dir for wifey and me).

It is always the year of Linux on the desktop if you're willing to make your family suffer! Freedom from the copyright subscription fascists etc...

[jazzyjackson]

Good point re: investment not being made for p2p tech, maybe consumers never demanded it, or it could be that the ISPs are also the broadcasters who want to protect their copyrights

(thinking about it, it's not clear this had to be the case, the phone lines were made for symmetric communication but dial-up was subsumed by cable providers - we got higher speeds but only because it was in the broadcasters' interest to sell us media packages, they were never going to help us send files to each other)

[myself248]

Worse, a lot of ISPs have implemented transfer caps that disincentivize seeding. I dropped my residential-class service and switched to business-class which has no caps, but that's probably not an option for everyone.

[jazz_from_hell]

Is that in the US? ISPs seems to be quite weird over there (: